SouthWest Transit App

I rode SouthWest Transit to and from the University of Minnesota. The schedule was a folded piece of paper, and I lost it, left it, or carried the outdated one often enough that missing the bus stopped being bad luck and started being the system working as designed.

It is worst at the end of a long day. You stand at the shelter doing arithmetic on a timetable you are not sure is current, and the next bus is thirty minutes away, and in February that is a real thirty minutes.

The agency ran a good service. It had no way to tell anyone about it after they left the house.

Built it before anyone asked me to. A native iOS prototype that put the schedules on the phone instead of in a pocket — the thing I wanted on the sidewalk, running, on a device.

Then I took it to SouthWest Transit and pitched them. They did not have to imagine it; they picked it up. They liked it enough to contract the work, and I shipped iOS and Android inside three months.

Schedules alone were not the whole answer. A printed time is a promise; riders needed the bus. Metro Transit's NexTrip had the real-time arrivals, and there was no public way in, so I found an unofficial endpoint and folded live predictions into the app.

We launched. Downloads climbed, riders used it, and Metro Transit noticed — not for the reasons we were hoping.

They called us in. We got a slap on the wrist for the unofficial endpoint, and then, in the same meeting, access to their internal NexTrip API. The thing that looked like it would end the project is what made it legitimate.

Then I rewrote the app in Apache Cordova with Ionic. This was before React Native existed. One codebase, both platforms, and releases that went out in the time it used to take to do one of them.

That mattered more than it sounds. A transit app is never finished — routes change, seasons change, the agency wants an alert out this afternoon. Cutting the deployment cost is what let a one-person practice keep a live service current for six years.

SouthWest was the first regional transit provider in the Twin Cities with its own app. Once it existed, every other agency in the metro wanted one, and the referral out of it was Plymouth Metrolink — the same problem, the same rider, a very similar app.

SouthWest Transit runs SW Prime on the Spare platform today. What I built has been replaced, which is what happens to transit software over a decade. The work above is history, not a live system.