NYC School Bus 4+

I applaud and support the intention here. I use this in the morning to make sure the bus isn’t late and in the afternoon to make sure it isn’t arriving early. But the frustrations with this app make it unusable at times.

1) I have to enter my password multiple times a day on the same device, which is very, very frustrating. This app needs to take advantage of iOS authentication mechanisms that are much faster, such as Face ID.

2) Beyond that frustration, the performance can be unacceptably slow at times, with 10+ second waits to see the map after logging in, and sometimes multi-minute latency on the driver’s exact location, which undermines the degree to which I can trust this app.

Parents are busy, and this app is used during some of the most stressful times of the day. Please invest in it further so that it reduces our stress rather than adding to it. Thank you!

“Something went wrong,” says the app. Yes, everything went wrong: Despite NYC public schools spending millions for Via to provide an app to track the school buses our children ride, despite paying for GPS trackers to be installed on the buses, despite whatever was paid to develop this app, Via has never been able to make it work for NYC public school parents to track our children’s buses. This is the largest public school system in the United States, in a heavily congested, traffic nightmare city, and we could really use the ability to track our children on their school buses, which are so often late or don’t show up. I log in (not easy with glitchy interface), see my children, who ride the bus every day to and from school, and every morning and every afternoon it says “no activity”—even though I put them on the bus and pick them up myself. They are on the bus. This is just a colossal failure. If it ever works, I’ll update my review, because we really need this to happen!

When it is working properly it’s great. Otherwise like this morning , it just keeps buffering and you cannot get in. Has happened 3 times since the app first launched. Why can’t the city and it’s IT staff get it together and work out these glitches? It’s called , testing, updating, quality assurance and caring about your job , the community and the whole purpose of creating this app. The same thing happens with the NYC parking App. Never have any problems with any other App I have ever used. Always an issue with anything affiliated with a NYC App only.