Fleety - Subway & Bus Tracker

Review by eFreeware

Fleety is a free transit tracker for Android from Global Transit Inc., filed under Maps & Navigation. It follows buses, subways, light rail, streetcars and ferries across more than 100 US cities, using live GPS positions and official agency feeds to tell you where your ride is and when it will arrive.

The appeal is concentration: instead of juggling a subway app, a bus app and a regional rail app, you get one dashboard for live maps, countdown timers, service alerts and trip planning. For anyone whose day depends on catching a vehicle on time, that is a useful thing to have in one place.

Who gets the most from a transit tracker like this

The people I would expect to get the most out of Fleety are the ones who ride the same handful of routes often: commuters heading to an office, students moving between campus and home, and city residents who rely on public transit as their main way of getting around. The developer also pitches it at travelers visiting a US city, since the coverage list spans most major metros.

It is not built for people who drive everywhere. The developer lists more than 100 cities and over 100 agencies, and the named examples lean heavily on the largest systems: MTA in New York, CTA in Chicago, LA Metro, MBTA in Boston and WMATA in Washington, D.C. If your city appears in that list, the app is aimed at you.

The feature set also assumes a certain kind of trip. Multi-modal planning, transfer details, walking paths and alerts about track changes matter most when a journey involves more than one vehicle. Someone who takes a single bus two stops to a grocery store will use a much thinner slice of what is on offer.

Live maps and vehicle tracking

The core of the app is a live map showing where buses, trains, subways and streetcars currently are. Fleety pulls GPS positions and updates them as vehicles move, so you can watch a bus approach rather than guess from a printed timetable. The developer says tracking works across municipal lines, which matters in metro areas where a single journey crosses from one agency's territory into another's.

Arrival times are based on official GTFS real-time feeds from transit agencies. Pick a station, platform or roadside stop and the app shows a countdown.

Alerts reach you when service is disrupted, delayed or moved to another track. A recent update brought refreshed schedules, more accurate arrivals and performance fixes.

Planning a trip with transfers and walking legs

The trip planner covers journeys that mix modes, including buses, subways, commuter rail, ferries, light rail and trolleys, with step-by-step directions, transfer details and walking segments. ETAs are adjusted for current traffic conditions and rail status, so a plan built in the morning can reflect what is actually happening on the network.

This is the part of the app that takes the most getting used to, because multi-modal planning always involves reading a sequence of legs rather than a single arrival time. The payoff is for trips you do not make often: an airport run that combines a bus, a train and a walk, or a cross-town journey where two agencies are involved.

Saved routes and frequent stops are the shortcut for the trips you do make often. Favorites sit on the home screen for one-tap access, which is the sensible way to handle a commute you repeat five days a week.

Schedules that keep working underground

You can keep routes, stops and timetables on the device for offline use. That covers riding a subway underground with no signal, and traveling with mobile data switched off to conserve it. In airplane mode, the saved schedule is what you have.

Offline access is built around what you saved in advance, so the app rewards a little preparation before you leave.

Coverage is broad: cities across the Northeast, the South, the Midwest, the West and Hawaii, from New York, Boston and Philadelphia through Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Seattle, Los Angeles, Honolulu and Salt Lake City. The named agencies include MTA Subway and Bus, LIRR, Metro-North, NJ Transit, CTA, Metra, PACE, MBTA, SEPTA, WMATA, MARTA, DART, LA Metro, Metrolink, MTS, VTA, TriMet, Sound Transit, King County Metro, RTD, UTA, Valley Metro, Miami-Dade Transit, Tri-Rail, Brightline and the Miami Beach Trolley.

What Fleety costs and how it is funded

Fleety is free to download and shows ads. It also offers in-app purchases.

For a free transit tool, that is a familiar arrangement, and the practical question is whether the trade is acceptable to you. I would treat the presence of ads and purchases as the cost of entry rather than a hidden catch, and judge the app on whether the tracking and planning are good enough to keep installed.

The install base is modest so far. Fleety has been downloaded more than 10,000 times and holds a 4.4 average from 469 ratings, with 35 written reviews. That is a small sample for an app covering this many cities, but it is a positive one.

How it compares with agency apps and map services

The obvious alternative is the app your local transit agency publishes. They are built for their own system, which is exactly the gap Fleety is trying to fill: one app for a journey that crosses agency boundaries, with a single interface for buses, rail, ferries and trolleys.

General map and navigation services are the other comparison. They handle routing well. Fleety is narrower and deeper on transit specifically.

If you ride one system and nothing else, the official option may be enough. Fleety makes more sense when your week involves more than one operator, or when you travel to other US cities and want a tool that already knows the local network.

A focused tracker for multi-agency commuters

Fleety is worth installing if your daily travel involves more than one transit operator, or if you want live vehicle positions, countdown timers and disruption alerts in a single app rather than spread across several. The offline schedule saving is a genuine convenience for underground sections and for anyone watching their data use.

It covers US cities rather than everywhere, and it is free but ad-supported with in-app purchases. The 4.4 rating from a few hundred users suggests people are broadly satisfied, though the install numbers are still small.

If you live in one of the covered metros and ride transit most days, this is a reasonable app to try. If your city is not on the list, or you drive, there is nothing here for you.

What's new in version 0.53.0

• Updated transit schedules • Improved arrival accuracy • Performance and stability fixes