MBTA Commuter Rail App

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While the app is not completely useless, it adds little value compared to keeping a photo of a recent schedule on my phone. The photo is quicker to access, provides more relevant information with less effort, doesn’t bother me with irrelevant information, and is less likely to crash. This app could be great, but it isn’t. The alerts are all generic. The app doesn’t provide real-time tracking of when the next train arrives. It doesn’t learn which schedule I usually want to see or which trains I usually board. It doesn’t warn about trains with no air conditioning. There’s no system map or fare schedule. Why does the Keolis app always say “No data”? Why does it randomly quit nearly every day? Why does it ask about updating schedules when I’m rushing to catch a train, rather than in the middle of the night while I’m sleeping and the phone is connected to WiFi? Why does it keep displaying an ad for the mTicket app that I installed ages ago? How can I easily specify the two stations between which I travel, without committing to a specific trip each way, and without having to laboriously enter both stations and “weekday” every single time I want to see the schedule? Very disappointing.

I (and I’m sure many others) have different trains that I need to take during the week - leaving later on Mondays than Tuesdays, etc. Beneath Trips the app should allow me to specify what train I’m trying to hit each day of the week (or ideally have even richer scheduling, like every other Monday being a later train, or the third Thursday of a month being later, etc). I want to be able to enjoy what the app authors clearly intended: to wake up every day and see one page telling me I have an hour and three minutes to get to my train.. but as of now I have to double check each morning that the night before I planned out that morning’s train (and didn’t just fall asleep etc). The app is very good, but this is the one thing I miss. I hope to see this in a future update at which point my rating of this app will go up.

This app is okay, but definitely leaves a lot to be desired. First and foremost, it is clunky to use and navigate in my opinion. Secondly, if your train is cancelled, it will not show up on the trip screen...it will only show up in the “alerts”. The screen will continue to show you a departure time despite the trip being cancelled. Real time information is often not available and the count-down ticker is just for show. Often times, when the real time information is available, I find it reasonably accurate, so that’s a plus. It is effective to check arrival and departure times probably about 70% of my experience on my line.

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I use to think this app had a purpose. That is until a recent change / schedule update. Then I realized just how non intuitive this app really is. For example if I'm travelog to and from Abington all I should need tíos choose Abington and that's it right? Nope not only do I have to choose Abington along with south station but I then have to choose every train schedule with in those parameters. As we all know that train runs I. Two different lines. How about making it a little more intuitive by allowing the user to choose there destination and have the app populate the rest. Not only that when you set up your trip you can only set up one at a time. This coold also be changed by just letting us select say Framingham and then the app intuitively populates all the needed info as well as let's yuu choose inbound or outbound.

This has been, so far, the best app for the Commuter Rail. However, it would be nice to be able to choose a favorite route so that I don’t always have to start over from scratch when I open the app. Being able to select FAVORITES from a menu, for example, South Station to Brockton or Brockton to South Station and the schedule would automatically pop up. This would be so useful and helpful.