Muni Diaries

Gizmodo writer and Muni Diaries Live alum Annalee Newitz took her first Leap journey and found that on purely the usability level, there is another app that beats Leap’s service for a very simple reason. Her story details the slightly confusing morning of trying to find the Leap bus, and then this happened:

First, it didn’t even have an Android app – to buy my coffee, I had to borrow the iPhone app of the woman working behind the counter. More importantly, Leap’s mobile site didn’t tell me when the next bus would be coming. Sure, Leap promises that they will come every 15 minutes during the hours when they run. But I couldn’t time my arrival at the bus stop because Leap wouldn’t tell me when the bus was coming. The teeny blue bus icon didn’t even show up on their real-time map until it was about a block away from my stop.

This wouldn’t seem like such an affront if it weren’t for the fact that San Francisco’s public transit system uses an app called NextBus which is actually ridiculously helpful. It geolocates you, and gives you a list of arrival times for all the buses in your immediate area.

We can probably all agree that knowing when the bus is coming is…kind of, sort of, important when you’re trying to get somewhere, right? You can read the rest of her journey on Gizmodo. You should also check out this excellently illustrated and well-written story on the privatization of buses in San Francisco.

Bonus: Check out Annalee’s story at Muni Diaries Live about Muni taking on an asshole car driver.