Grand River Transit (GRT) Flex 4+

First off, I’d like to preface by saying that the GRT Flex service is amazing and incredibly useful on the physical side of things. It’s saved me many 50+ minute walks to and from the Breslau neighbourhood where I live and the Victoria/Lackner bus stop, the bus is well kept and the drivers are all incredibly nice and great drivers.

However, while the service itself is awesome, there are a few issues(okay, one BIG issue) that could be improved on the application side of things. The UI can feel convoluted at times when trying to access information, you often have to excessively fiddle with times and between leave at/arrive at to get a schedule that actually functions for what you need as it will arbitrarily assign you strange times despite the time that you need actually being perfectly accessible, and the application itself occasionally just randomly becomes clunky to use in general(although that may be my extremely old phone and terribly slow data’s fault).

Now, none of the above issues are terrible, and can be easily overlooked. However, the one huge issue I have consistently run into and occasionally been screwed over is schedule changes. More specifically, the applications failure to notify the user of them occurring. I understand that this is a FLEX service, and that the schedule changing due to other bookings is unavoidable and part of the service. However, the application does not really support this aspect of the service, as whenever the schedule changes, the app DOES NOT GIVE THE USER ANY NOTIFCATION. Far too often have I found myself rushing out the door to catch the bus arriving 10 minutes early because someone booked it 30 minutes prior, taking precedence over what I booked over a day ago. On the same coin, I also find myself often anxiously waiting 15 minutes past my scheduled time at my stop for similar reasons. I’ve even missed the bus entirely a couple times because of how drastically early the schedule changes to, making me miss over an hour of my packed university classes. All this due to the app not giving notifications as to schedule changes.

Again, I love the actual service, and I accept that schedule changes are an integral part of a flexible transit system. It’s just that the actual application doesn’t really seem to support how flexible the service is. With all that in mind, if any people at GRT read this, PLEASE add notifications that signal schedule changes. It would elevate such an already great service to something truly amazing and profoundly useful.

The timing of the bus arrivals are way off, it will leave in 5 minutes and the bus doesn’t show up for another 20

It’s just stopped working out of nowhere. It doesn’t give me bus routes. No matter what location I put. It had worked for weeks without any issue. I have tried reinstalling it but no help there.
I am genuinely upset, because this app was rlly a life saver:(