It’s a weeknight. You’re at happy hour when suddenly your internal “I’m too old to be up this late on a school night” alarm goes off. So you say your goodbyes and head to the metro to make your way home. Except you get there just in time to see the train pull away from the platform dooming you to a 20 minute wait. 19 minutes later your friends show up from the bar and get on the same train you do. It’s only 20 minutes wasted, but it’s the principle of the thing. It’s not fair they’re going to get home at the same time you are.
The DC Rider iPhone app layout is simple enough. You’re presented with the standard DC Metro map. Touching a station brings up a webpage inside the app with the arrival times for that station updated in real time.
What the app does isn’t particularly groundbreaking – it’s pulling information directly from WMATA’s website – but it’s free and more efficient than their mobile page which isn’t very user friendly. The app also comes with a few interesting bonuses.
Tapping “Details” under the arrival times displays events taking place near that stop (sometimes these events have actually already happened) and if you’re one of those people that just has to connect every single aspect of your life to Facebook somehow, you can do that too. DC rider lets you sign into your Facebook account and sound off on your Metro line of choice. It even collects any tweet mentioning WMATA so you can get your fill of people complaining about their commutes on the go.
In the end though, it’s really just the simple ability to quickly find out when a train is coming and bookmark stations you’re going to be checking up on regularly that make DC Rider worth downloading.
Those not in DC may have a harder time finding real-time rail arrivals in their own cities, but the mobile versions of MTA.info and transitchicago.com for New York and Chicago respectively offer some help. The CTA even lists a number of apps for download.