2013 will bring with it some major changes for public transportation in New York City.
The Metropolitan Transit Authority is going mobile with a new iOS app that allows riders of seven train lines to plan their trips in a more detailed fashion than ever imaginable before.
Hailed as a “first for the largest subway system in the U.S.,” the MTA Subway Time app uses train location data to give app users highly specific and up-to-the-minute arrival times details for seven of the system’s 24 subway lines.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the seven lines use “updated signals yoked to centralized computers able to transmit location and speed data for every train in motion.”
It’s the minimum needed to make a live app work, but it hasn’t come cheap. The new signals were installed at a cost of more than $228 million over 11 years, the MTA said.
The MTA says that Android and Windows Phone versions of the app are being planned and will roll out in the near future.
