NYC School Bus

First, not only do you have to sign on every time, sometimes you have to sign in a few times just to get going. Second, most of the time, it just doesn’t work. This week it keeps loading and then tells you something went wrong. Then you have to sign on again. Every day this week so far it hasn’t worked. The worst is when they have a substitute bus driver and that person is a little older and can’t figure out the app, they don’t turn it on. The bus driver today got a bit salty with me because he had to wait a minute for us because he was 12 minutes late and I went back inside with my kid cause it was freezing. I told him he had to turn the app on and he said he doesn’t bother with that.

I applaud and support the intention here. I use this in the morning to make sure the bus isn’t late and in the afternoon to make sure it isn’t arriving early. But the frustrations with this app make it unusable at times. 1) I have to enter my password multiple times a day on the same device, which is very, very frustrating. This app needs to take advantage of iOS authentication mechanisms that are much faster, such as Face ID. 2) Beyond that frustration, the performance can be unacceptably slow at times, with 10+ second waits to see the map after logging in, and sometimes multi-minute latency on the driver’s exact location, which undermines the degree to which I can trust this app. Parents are busy, and this app is used during some of the most stressful times of the day. Please invest in it further so that it reduces our stress rather than adding to it. Thank you!

“Something went wrong,” says the app. Yes, everything went wrong: Despite NYC public schools spending millions for Via to provide an app to track the school buses our children ride, despite paying for GPS trackers to be installed on the buses, despite whatever was paid to develop this app, Via has never been able to make it work for NYC public school parents to track our children’s buses. This is the largest public school system in the United States, in a heavily congested, traffic nightmare city, and we could really use the ability to track our children on their school buses, which are so often late or don’t show up. I log in (not easy with glitchy interface), see my children, who ride the bus every day to and from school, and every morning and every afternoon it says “no activity”—even though I put them on the bus and pick them up myself. They are on the bus. This is just a colossal failure. If it ever works, I’ll update my review, because we really need this to happen!