Busly - SF Muni, WMATA, MBTA 4+

Best app for SF MUNI (and it’s not close!)

Long time SF resident. There’s no other app that is simultaneously as accurate & simple as Busly. I’ve been loving this app since Busly’s predecessor (SF MUNI) and now it’s even better. Magnificently streamlined GUI and 99% accurate departure times. I trust this app more than Google Maps, which gives decent scheduled times but sometimes lacks real-time data.

Almost great

I really like having an accurate map view of buses. In particular, I like being able to quickly see how close a bus is to where I current am. But there’s 2 major annoyances I have:

1. Every bus line is either red or blue. If different lines were different colors, I’d be able to more quickly see at a glance where buses for each line are. I’d also be able to easily differentiate individual buses when multiple lines run on top of each other.
2. When you click a stop, it shows the time until the next bus arrives next to the line name, not the number. At least in SF, bus number is much more important when comparing multiple buses. I don’t even know a lot of the line names. Because of this, when I click on a stop with multiple lines running through it, it’s hard to figure out when the next bus I care about is coming.

Developer Response ,

Hi blizzards7,

This is great feedback!

Regarding the colors, while they're currently set by the transit agency I've been thinking of adding a way for users to manually override the color to help mitigate the exact issue you pointed out. Do you think this would be an acceptable solution? While I could change the colors I get from the transit agency myself, I'd prefer to stick with what they send me just to stay accurate to what they intended and then just let users customize the color if needed.

For the arrival times, one thing to maybe simplify things is after you tap on a stop, you'll see the stop name and directly under it will be a row of colored buttons, one for each off the routes that pass through that stop. If you tap on those route buttons, you can disable/enable that particular route and the arrival times will be filtered so that only arrival times for enabled routes will be shown. Alternatively, if you care just about a specific bus number, you can tap the Search button in the top left of the map screen and type in the bus number which will show you just the arrival times for that specific bus number.

Not sure if this fully solves the issue you've been having so please don't hesitate to contact me directly via Settings > Support > Contact App Support if you have additional thoughts on how these issues could be tackled.

Cheers,
Alex

Removed it twice

I tried it twice and removed it twice.
It doesn’t have favorites and it’s just too cumbersome to look for the same route number of times a day.
This app has something that is called “Enabled Routes” instead of Favorites which I found it more annoying than useful.
Imagine your city has 90 bus lines but you use only 15 of them. If you selected these 15 routes as Favorites, you can select let’s say only the 3 you are using in the morning and than switch the routes to other 2 ones you use on weekends. But these routes will always be in your Favorite tab.
Busly has Enabled Routes so when you marked 15 lines as that, you will see them all at once. If you are not interested in seeing let’s say 10 of them, you have to remove them from Enabled Routes which puts them back in a pool of all the routes (90) in your city. If you want to see these routes again than you will have to scroll through all the routes to mark them again as enabled.
Imagine if you browser would show you all your favorites at once; that would be very unhelpful, right?

Developer Response ,

EDIT: Favorites is now available! With the latest update (v1.1), you can add/remove Routes & Stops to a dedicated list of Favorites for quick access. Really sorry it took so long but I'd love for you to give the app a third try if you've still got it in you :)

Also, if there's any additional functionality you feel may be missing, please don't hesitate to reach out to me directly via the in app Support screen or by editing this review.
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Hi Annoyedbycoinbase,

I fully agree with you that Favorites are definitely missing from the Busly app as it currently stands. Rest assured, this is a top priority feature for me to implement and I’m working as quickly as I can to get the feature ready for release.

I’d be happy to update you if you’d like once it’s available (just let me know via the in app Support button).

Cheers,
Alex