Ride Systems 4+

Update- working again in June 2023 for GMU

Update- working again in June 2023. Happy to have it back and operational

After roughly 3 years of working pretty well the app no longer works for myself or anyone else using it at George Mason University. The app will open but then stays at the loading screen, and never actually loads…. hopefully the developer will see this and fix it or the University will drop it for something that actually works

Clunky interface, limited functionality

If you’re not familiar with the area, this app won’t help you one bit. It’s designed with the assumption that you already know where you are, which bus route you need, and where the nearest stop is for that route. It doesn’t show you where you are or help you plan how to get from A to B. It will show you one route at a time and the current location of any bus on that route, and that’s it.

And for an app that pretty much only does one thing, it doesn’t even do it well. The “routes” and “current location” icons are confusingly similar, your location isn’t shown on the map, and the menu buttons are backwards of convention. When selecting a route, the route icons are much larger than necessary, resulting in the menu taking up way too much of the screen. Also, selecting a new route resets the map’s center and zoom level, which would be fine if it showed a dot for your location, but instead you have to manually find yourself on the map again.

Bottom line: this app is okay for showing you where busses are, and not okay for anything else you’d expect it to do.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for your feedback! This is the type of feedback we love to see so that we can make improvements to the app moving forward. We are always working to improve the app and its functionality. If you have more ideas, please send those to support@ridesystems.net.

The application does have the ability to show your current location. If you tap the arrow icon in the top left corner of the screen, it will drop a pin at your current location.

Are they real?

So it might just be me, and I would totally be fine with that. I could have just accidently missed the bus as I sat for 90 minutes on a 45 minute route in front of the bus stop staring at every single car drive by and watching other people wait for the bus and then leave after the app said they had arrived at the current bus stop two or three times.

In short please don’t lie and say that a bus or shuttle is coming in a certain amount of time or every 45 minutes. After trying to use the shuttle 4 or five times, getting there 5 to 10 minutes early each time or waiting an hour and a half its just not cool to advertise that you’re gonna do a shuttle then make hundreds of people throughout the day wait for a bus that is never going to come. And yes I have talked to several people at the bus stops and all of them have had the same thing happen.

If a bus is not functioning or there are no drivers please let us know on the app, that would be so nice.

I don’t care if you do a shuttle or not. But please don’t lie saying the bus is coming when it literally is NOT coming.

Just double check, then cancel the route or say there is no shuttle today. If you were to do that a lot of people would be much happier than figuring out for themselves an hour later that there is no shuttle coming.