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aaronbrethorstyesterday at 6:54 PM1 replyview on HN

I work on a suite of open source public transit software projects, collectively called OneBusAway (or OBA). The software is used by millions of transit riders every day around the world, including in New York City, the Seattle area, San Diego, and Washington, D.C.

Through the non-profit that collectively owns OBA, I've been working on a managed services offering to help transit agencies adopt the software, which has historically been beloved by users, but a real pain to set up and maintain. The software, cleverly named OBA Cloud, turns what used to require a month-long engagement with a transit consulting firm into a 15 minute, wizard-driven process.

The best part is that since all of the software is free and open source, a transit agency that decides they love OBA but wants to be locked back into an expensive contract can always ask a consulting firm to run the software for them.

Since last month[1], we've added a number of great new features to OBA Cloud, like broadcasting critical alerts to all riders in the system via push notification, and support for Live Activities on iOS.

We're hosting four new public transit systems over last month, and are continuing to make terrific strides on our other marquee projects:

The iOS app update went live, and our riders are generally loving it: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/onebusaway/id329380089

The new Android app maintainer is gearing up to release the biggest new version of the app in a decade: https://github.com/onebusaway/onebusaway-android/

Our GSoC interns are continuing to do amazing work on their projects, including the next generation OBA API server, Maglev: https://github.com/onebusaway/maglev

We're always looking for more folks to contribute to the project, across a variety of disciplines (ie not just engineers!): https://ossvolunteers.com/organizations/open-transit-softwar...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48888489


Replies

willmeyersyesterday at 7:31 PM

Hey! I just posted in this thread about my work on building a better CTrail app. I live in NYC - would love to get involved in this. Thanks for sharing!

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