Big Data For Big Cities

Moovit has created the Waze of public transit. Is this the app that can beat urban congestion?

- Alan Ohnsman

Like most suburbanites, Janice Monkowski, a piano teacher who lives in Danville, California, some 30 miles east of San Francisco, gets around mainly by car. For much of her life, public transit was not even an afterthought.

That changed recently when Monkowski, a self-described technophobe, discovered Moovit. When she goes to San Francisco to meet friends or catch the symphony with her husband, the smartphone app lets her plan bus and train trips down to the minute. “Moovit tells me where to walk and how long it might take to catch a bus to get to the train station,” Monkowski says. “It had probably been 10 or 15 years since I’d ridden a transit bus.”

In exchange for the free service, Monkowski lets Moovit track her trips. Much like the navigation app Waze, which follows its users on the road to determine optimal driving routes, Moovit aggregates Monkowski’s location data with that of other nearby users to predict the most efficient public-transit trip between two locations. “Transit users have an even bigger problem than drivers,” says Nir Erez, a 52-year-old Israeli serial entrepreneur who cofounded Moovit in 2012.

Most commuters don’t know when a bus might arrive – let alone how it might connect with another transit service – or when walking or bicycling might be faster, Erez says, speaking from his home in Tel Aviv: “Information is usually bad.”