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Tel Aviv & San Francisco – August 22, 2017
Today Moovit announced the addition of the 1,500th city to the world’s most popular public transit app, proving Moovit is the only app you need to ride the buses, subways, ferries, streetcars, cable cars, trams, water taxis and other forms of public transit in 77 countries. The company reached the 1,500 city milestone in just four years, five months. The total population of those cities is approximately 1.1 billion with the number of potential mass transit riders estimated at 550 million people.
The American city of Dayton, Ohio is the 1,500th city added to Moovit. It is one of nine cities added to Moovit so far in August. The State of Ohio also is home to Moovit’s 1,501st city, Athens (not to be confused with the original Athens, Greece, where Moovit launched in 2014). Other new cities for Moovit are in Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, France, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and the U.S. Overall, Moovit launches in a new city every 15 hours. Up next is Gopiapo, Chile. Then Plovdiv, Bulgaria followed by Volta Redonda, Brazil and Maryborough-Hervey Bay, Australia.
Moovit, which was named Google’s top local app in 2016, stands apart from the hundreds of local transit apps managed by bus or rail companies, cities, or independent organizations that repackage publicly available transit data for a small number of metropolitan areas. Moovit’s ubiquity is due to its unique way of collecting transit data. Mixing available public data, including transit timetables and live information, with crowdsourced data from its more than 70 million users and 180,000-strong community of local volunteers, the company has amassed the world’s largest repository of transit data. Moovit turns this data back into the app to provide local commuters everything they need to get around town via public transit in the easiest and most convenient way, including the most accurate and precise transit directions, timetables and transit stop locations anywhere. Moovit also has turned its data into a set of valuable tools for urban planners, governments and developers who are rewriting the rules for managing and governing a future that includes autonomous vehicles, increased ridesharing and alternate forms of transit yet to be introduced.
“The world is on the threshold of a huge transit revolution,” says Moovit Co-founder and CEO Nir Erez. “Urban mobility is at the top of the list for smart cities to be better equipped to deal with burgeoning populations in their centers. With Moovit’s deep repository of hundreds of millions of data points added every day, and a set of unrivaled analytics tools that clearly represent the demand for transit in cities, Moovit is uniquely qualified in the area of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) to help bring the future of urban mobility to life.”
Moovit Launches in Dayton
“Moovit launches in Dayton with great enthusiasm,” said Moovit Head of North America Operations Steve Swasey. “Dayton is a terrific transit-oriented city to be named #1,500 on the global Moovit map.”
The Greater Dayton Regional Transit Authority (RTA) provides more than nine million passenger trips a year in the state of Ohio’s greenest fleet of diesel, hybrid diesel and electric trolley buses.
“With Moovit now available in Dayton, riders are able to more easily plan and manage RTA’s more than 3,000 stops on 34 routes through Montgomery and western Greene Counties,” Swasey said.
RTA has added the Moovit app on its website to and encourages its riders to download the free app on their iOS or Android smartphones.
“Our goal is to provide customers with options when it comes to planning their travel. We’re excited to now be able to add Moovit to the list of available tools for our customers,” said Brandon Policicchio, chief customer and business development officer for the Greater Dayton RTA.
Crowdsourcing: Moovit’s Competitive Advantage
Moovit has opened its app in 250 cities around the world so far in 2017. Of those, more than 150 were opened exclusively from the contribution of its community of 180,000 local volunteers called “Mooviters” who make Moovit the Wikipedia of public transit. Mooviters are eager to provide better transit information in their cities and towns where local apps are insufficient or non-existent. Moovit enables Mooviters to “map” the transit information in their communities by using Moovit’s proprietary local editor tool to add transit stops, routes, timetables and other information on Moovit’s app. Doing this significantly improves the transit experience and makes Mooviters local heroes.
Examples of cities “mapped’ by Mooviters include:
In the U.S.: Knoxville, Tennessee commuters had no journey planner for their transportation network until May 2015 when local resident Joseph Linzer mapped the entire city’s 1,243 bus stops on Moovit. Joseph regularly updates his city, and recently helped bring Moovit to the public transit riders of neighboring Clarksville, another city previously not available on any public transportation app
In Brazil: With its population of nearly one million, Joao Pessoa was the first city launched by the Mooviter Community, in 2014. Local community member Vitor Rodrigo Dias led the effort and finished mapping 3,249 bus stops in less than two months. Vitor eventually became one of Moovit’s first Mooviter Ambassadors and continues to lead city mapping projects throughout Brazil.
In Turkey: In May 2017, Fatih Aktaş, who is 90 percent visually impaired, wanted to bring Moovit to the 332,000 residents of his city of Balikesir in central Turkey. He petitioned the city to share information about its public transit network online. Fatih then asked 20 friends to help map the routes and add the schedules to Moovit. Moovit Country Manager Busra Yurgun joined Fatih’s mapathon marathon and within a week all 60 lines operating in the city were added to Moovit. Fatih and his team continue to update the city’s information, and Fatih intends to join Moovit’s accessibility test groups for new in-app features that help persons with disabilities.
Thanks in part to the Mooviter program, the company now has more than 2,000 cities in its launch pipeline and adds a new city every 15 hours.
Says Erez:, “Reaching the milestone of 1,500 cities available on Moovit is only the start. Moovit’s goal is to improve the public transit information, accessibility, and experience to everyone in the world who owns a smartphone and rides public transit.”
