BART (Official)

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This app appears to be an attempt at merging several different apps that address different issues: Schedule, Live ETA of train arrivals, hazards reporting, and advisories/outages. It’s a good initiative but it experiences issues on all of those attempts. The scheduler and live ETA don’t work well after midnight but BART has trains up to an hour past midnight, so it is rough there. It also only provides ETA down to minutes while other apps like BARTPro provide updates down to seconds and are also hooked to the BART API for accuracy. Advisory and outages are okay, it’s about 80% accurate for reporting escalator outages, but not perfect. Hazards reporting is the worst, I have received no confirmation or replies each time I’ve reporting incidents from finding people taking residence in elevators to exposed injectable needles lying on seats. At least you would get a confirmation and often a live response back from a person when reporting via BART Watch app, so I’m not sure if my reports are going through. All in all, it’s a good initiative but the app is mostly not usable compared to other more reliable apps at this time for the different features.

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In the “Plan Trip” menu, this app needs an alphabetical list of stations to automatically appear as choices under the search bubble. The webpage app used to do something similar to this. I don’t want to type into the search bar and have to frantically guess at the correct name of the station that I want to depart from or arrive at, but I can always easily find it in a list. The trip planner would be way easier and more efficient if I could just look at the standard BART route map and pick a starting station and a destination station from it before anything else. Also, when trip results come up, I see that connected bus route numbers/letters are immediately visible but if I want to know what BART route it is I have to click to see another screen. Shouldn’t the name of the BART route show up on the first screen the same as the bus numbers?

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It’s great the developers want to cover all bases, but the default for a BART app should be BART only trips ... station to station with drop down menus to choose the station; times between trains for transfers, notification for alerts, etc. Making this the default will aid usability for those of us that want simple BART leave and arrive times; users who want more complicated trips can choose what they want covered in a connectind link. Doing this will also mean that users who just want BART only don’t have to sign up in order to get easily available results. An all things to all people home page is not a good design option for a BART official app. Also, this app is vertical only on the ipad; I’m hoping the developers will find that an easy fix and go ahead and fix it right away.

I'm confused by all the negative reviews. Maybe they updated it recently? It does exactly what I need it to do: show me the train schedule for the station I want. Nice that it automatically finds the nearest station, makes it easier. I might use the trip planner occasionally for trips I take that aren't my commute. And I like that the advisories sure up on the home screen. One slight nit, I liked that the web site automatically refreshed when I switched to it on my iPhone, but every 15 seconds is just fine for me. Great job, impressive app, not just for a public organization, but any developer!

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I was really excited BART released an official app, however this app fails to deliver the basic functionality I expect from a transit agency. I am able to see a departures list, but after tapping a departure I can’t see which stations a train will go to and what times it will arrive. I tried to use the trip planner but it gave me nonsensical results until I checked another mapping app that told me about a service advisory affecting normal routes (fortunately the trip planner was taking this into account). Finally, it doesn’t feel at home on iOS at all; must have been developed with some non-native cross platform framework that messes with scrolling and stuff. I hope BART is able to take this feedback and improve the app in the future.