TrainsPh

You left the house not knowing. Not whether the train would be late, everybody knew that, but how late, and how much of the platform you would be standing in once you got there. There was no accurate schedule to check and no way to look ahead, so you found out by going.

The people on the platform already knew

Whatever was happening at a station, somebody was standing in it. They could see how long the queue was and whether it was moving. None of that was written down anywhere a person still at home could read it, and that gap was the whole idea.

What we built

CCTV from every MRT station, so you could look at a platform before committing to it. When trains were arriving and leaving, and how far you were from the nearest MRT, LRT and PNR station. A rating bar where commuters said how packed a station was, and a chat where they answered each other’s questions.

The crowd reporting is the part we are proudest of. Everything that made the app worth opening came from the people using it.

Some of it was never in the app. We answered questions about what the trains were doing on the Play Store listing and on Facebook, because that is where people asked and somebody had to know.

People often took it for a government project, which says something about how it felt to use. The heart of it was never official at all, and that is the part worth carrying forward.

We are rebuilding it now around exactly that. The app keeps its name, and trains.ph is a website going up beside it.