From time to time, I meet someone new to Minneapolis or St. Paul who intends to try out the transit system. It might be an incoming college kid, a transplant, or an older person who downsized and moved to an urban area. I tell them that transit is great, but using it can be harder than they think. Without a few tips and tricks, the experience can quickly sour.

For example, always board the front car of the train when taking light rail. (The second or middle cars attract bad behavior, and all the regulars know this, which makes the situation even worse.) Don’t make eye contact or talk to with people unless absolutely necessary. Sign up for the TAP card if your income qualifies you. Don’t risk your safety to run to catch a train or bus (unless it’s a low-frequency route, in which case, go for it).  Don’t sit in the seats set aside for the disabled. Don’t wear your backpack on your back in a crowded train; take it off and keep it by your side. 

Perhaps most importantly, download the Transit App as soon as possible. This is a third-party app, originally from Montreal. In my opinion, it’s the most useful thing you can have on your phone. Luckily enough, thanks to a new policy by Metro Transit, everyone who takes transit regularly in the Twin Cities will be automatically upgraded to its premium service. This might not sound like a bit deal, but it’s a huge step toward making taking Twin cities transit easier for everyone.

From tokens to contactless

Confusion is a big barrier to transit for newcomers. Compared to driving a car, transit often lacks clarity around cost, stop location, and when and where things go. That goes triple when you’re taking the bus, with all its variable routes and inconsistent stop designs and low-overhead confusion. Where should I stand?  How do I pay? 

Transit agencies have tried to figure out how to make this situation easier and less stressful forever, but in the last 20 years there’s been a revolution around what might be called “user experience.” The kind of information accessible to transit riders now is light years beyond the olden days.

(For example, the agency used to rely on a telephone helpline to address confusion. A friend of mine once worked there, and told me a story about his most difficult task: helping a transit rider stand on exactly the right spot on the corner of East 46th Street and 46th Avenue South. Don’t try that at home.)

Contactless payment is the latest big innovation: Riders can use almost any credit card to pay fares, without any other hoops. The technology is available in cities like New York City and Portland, Oregon, and removes a hurdle for tourists or visitors for whom simply acquiring a transit card can be a deal breaker. This major leap forward from the era of physical tokens, which were part of my first transit experience of the Boston T in the 1990s.

All hail the Transit App

Knowing schedules has long been another larger barrier for transit noobs, especially things like frequency and span (i.e. how early or late a bus might run). In the old days, route schedules  used to be arcane knowledge reserved for insiders, those who had access to the hundreds of labyrinthine printed schedules and who knew how to read them. In those years, Metro Transit didn’t even have bus stop signs with information on them, something that once prompted a grassroots DIY movement of self-made signage. 

We’re a long way from that in 2025. Every Metro Transit bus stop boasts a lot of useful info and a distinct ID number. But even those are almost irrelevant given how great transit apps have become in the last decade. 

That’s something worth celebrating, because designing a good transit app is a fiendish proposition.  The basic challenge is how to convey complex information in a useful way, a problem made difficult because transit geography tends to be nonlinear. Certain spots tend to have dozens of different routes converging within a small space, whereas the vast majority of a transit system is far simpler, with just a one or two lines at low frequencies. 

The inequality of information density poses a real challenge for information visualization, including anyone working on signage, maps, or apps, making the Transit App’s simple interface into a revelation. The app began in the early 2010s and included smart mapping features when those were in their nascent phase. Even competing with the likes of Google and Apple, the cream rose to the top with a streamlined design that lets users immediately know the next arriving bus or train closest to them.  

For years now, even though each  individual transit agency builds and maintains their own app, I’ve simply relied on the Transit App to get around. And earlier this month Metro Transit announced a partnership with the company, making its best information free for any regular user.

“We sponsor the premium Royale service on behalf of our riders and in return hope to make their experience better and get more real-time feedback we can use to make improvements,” said Drew Kerr, the Metro Transit’s communications manager. 

While most of the third-party transit apps are free, they typically offer some kind of tiered services (for example, removing ads) that fund their technical operations. The app is free for everyone, but (for example) cuts off its access to information after the third closest bus or train by geographic proximity. Now, that won’t happen; every transit rider in the Twin Cities will be able to use the app to see all the incoming nearby routes.

“In general, we want to make it easier and easier to plan trips and provide feedback and this app is another way to do that,” Kerr explained. “About 21,000 people in the region are already using the Transit App, so this is also about us meeting people where they already are.”

It’s a good move by the agency, because the once-underdog Canadian app is easier to use and more fun than almost any of its competitors. My advice: If you ever want to take the bus or train in the Twin Cities and haven’t done it yet, download Transit App right now. You’ll soon enjoy the ease of knowing what’s going on. It’s quite a liberation.

Bill Lindeke

Bill Lindeke is a lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography, Environment and Society. He is the author of multiple books on Twin Cities culture and history, most recently St. Paul: an Urban Biography. Follow Bill on Twitter: @BillLindeke.

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