
IN THE NEWS: Frustrated by MARTA’s App, this Georgia Tech Grad Made His Own
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It took only one attempted use of the MARTA On the Go app to get Chad Etzel (CS 2006) riled up. The Georgia Tech grad had recently moved back to the area after living in San Francisco, where he had become accustomed to easy-to-use public transit. A trip from Milton to downtown for a football game proved a rude awakening.

“The official MARTA app was pretty rough,” Etzel says of the On the Go app. (MARTA operates three apps, for route information, fare payment, and public safety.) He immediately began envisioning a better version. A former Apple engineer, Etzel found all the data he needed online and began tinkering with an app that would provide more accurate, user-friendly information about MARTA’s buses and trains.
“It started as anger-driven development,” he says. “I decided to see how far I could take this.” A few days later, he had his prototype, which he named Terminus.
For his version of the public transit app, Etzel set about fixing things that were incomplete or frustrating in the existing one, such as the timetables for the bus routes. “In the official MARTA app, the routes have very few stops listed,” he says. “They only show times for five or six stops, when the route might have 20 stops.” Riders would have to estimate bus times for stops not listed, which would inevitably cause people to miss the bus. In addition, Etzel found software bugs that could cause the MARTA app to crash, and the screen size wasn’t configured to the latest smartphone specifications.
Once the user experience was refined, Etzel added features he thought would be of interest to MARTA riders, such as TSA wait times at the airport. All of the information Etzel used to build Terminus was already publicly available, including developer resources MARTA put online regarding its transit information. Terminus, in fact, is one of a handful of alternative local transit apps available online, though Etzel’s appears to be the only one built by a single local user.
MARTA not only is aware of these third-party apps, including Terminus, but also encourages such alternatives while it works on bettering its own. “We recognize the need for a modern official MARTA app,” says MARTA senior communications official Stephany Fisher. She notes the transit organization is working to roll its three apps into a single modernized version and is planning to add a contactless fare system, which would allow riders to pay by tapping a credit or debit card or a smartphone with mobile pay.
Terminus is currently free for iPhone and Android users; Etzel plans to keep it that way. “Atlanta deserves better,” he says. “Public transit is too important for a city like this not to have a well-functioning app. I want as many people in Atlanta to use it as possible to help improve their lives and get them where they’re going.”