🚌 Pico Transit: Public Transit for the Light Phone III

Pico Transit is a friendly little companion for getting around on public transit: real schedules, live arrivals, connections at any stop, and a live map showing where your ride actually is. No ads, no clutter, no infinite scroll. Just "where's my bus," answered nicely. 🚏✨

It covers 134 feeds. Live tracking works for MBTA, RIPTA, RTD Denver (with Bustang), LTC (London, Ontario), STM Montréal, CTA, NYC Subway, LIRR, Metro-North, NYC buses (all 5 boroughs plus MTA Bus Company), Nashville's WeGo, Cleveland's GCRTA, SEPTA's buses, Metro, and trolleys, COLTS in Scranton, the San Francisco Bay Area's 511.org agencies (BART, Muni, AC Transit, Caltrain, VTA, and dozens more), and all 9 Puget Sound agencies (King County Metro, Sound Transit, and more). The rest have schedules only for now: about 40 Colorado agencies, SEPTA Regional Rail, Southern New England's regional transit authorities and ferries, Metra, Pace, and LA Metro.

Use it on its own or alongside the Light Phone's Directions tool. It's built on the Light SDK, so it stays as calm and un-distracting as the rest of your Light experience.

📦 Pico Transit has begun the submission process to become a released community tool on the Light Phone III dashboard. Testers can install it now; see Getting it onto a real Light Phone III below.

🔄 Recent updates

v1.0.1

• 🗂️ Simpler Settings and About: both are now short menus that open focused pages (Agency and downloads, Service alerts, Explore and location, Map and gestures, and more). Redesigned by Jose Briones.
• 🙏 Thanks in About: About → Credits now thanks Light's development team and Jose Briones.

v1.0.0

• 📍 Default location: set a place in Settings → Explore (or from Explore's header) and Explore opens there. It's looked up once and saved on your phone. Current location can be the default too.
• 🔒 Location is opt-in: it's off until you turn it on in Explore or Settings, and a "Your data" notice on first launch explains what leaves your phone.
• 🚌 CTA buses on the map: buses show where they really are, including routes at stops you tap with Track tapped stops on. See everything isn't available for CTA yet.
• 🗺️ Maps show vehicles where they are: no more vehicles pinned to the map's edge. "Track tapped stops" also filters See everything to the stops you tap.
• ⬇️ Additional Schedules keep downloading after you leave the page, with progress shown when you come back.
• 🐛 Fixes: the search keyboard in Explore and Stations, a Settings crash, and clearer wording throughout.

v0.5.2

• 🚌 COLTS: Scranton's County of Lackawanna Transit System now goes by its full name, and searching "COLTS" finds it.
• 🔧 Light SDK update: brought up to date with the latest light-sdk.

v0.5.1

• 🚋 Cleveland, live: GCRTA's buses, Red Line, and light rail, with live arrivals, vehicles, and service alerts.
• 🔔 SEPTA, live: SEPTA's buses, Metro, and trolleys now show live arrivals, vehicles, and service alerts. Regional Rail stays schedules-only for now.
• 🚌 Northeastern Pennsylvania, live: COLTS (County of Lackawanna Transit System) in Scranton, with live arrivals, vehicles, and service alerts.
• ⚠️ More service alerts: Nashville's WeGo now has service alerts too.

v0.5.0

• ⚠️ Service alerts (optional, turn on in Settings): detours, closures, and other service changes for MBTA, RTD, LTC, NYC Subway, NYC buses, LIRR, Metro-North, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Puget Sound. See them on the home screen, as an alert icon on routes, stops, and trips, and as pop-ups when new ones arrive.
• 🚇 Closest match for every MBTA subway line: trains Pico Transit can't match to a scheduled trip now get a closest match on all subway lines, not just the Green Line.
• 🗺️ More places: SEPTA in Philadelphia, and a Southern New England region joining MBTA and RIPTA with 12 Massachusetts transit authorities and 8 ferries. 132 feeds in all.
• 🙏 Clearer data credits: agencies whose data comes through 511.org or Sound Transit are now credited by their own names.
• ✨ Simpler Settings and About screens, with short, plain descriptions.

v0.4.1

• 🌲 Puget Sound, live: King County Metro, Sound Transit, Pierce Transit, Community Transit, Kitsap Transit, Intercity Transit, Everett Transit, Washington State Ferries, and the Seattle Center Monorail now show live arrivals and vehicles, through Sound Transit's OneBusAway API.
• 🙏 Clearer data credits: King County Metro shows the credit King County asks for, and agencies whose data comes through Sound Transit or 511.org credit them alongside the agency.
• ⚙️ Tidier Settings: Clear schedule cache and Only download over Wi-Fi now sit right after the agency picker.
• ⌨️ Keyboard update: after typing a symbol or number, the keyboard switches back to letters, like the LightOS keyboard.

Earlier

• 🗺️ Easier-to-read maps: street names are drawn larger, and each map loads with about a quarter as many tile requests.
• 🚌 CTA bus trips load much faster: matching live buses to their scheduled trips no longer scans the whole schedule for every bus.
• 🔍 Explore search stays put: typing an address is no longer interrupted when the background location lookup finishes.
• 🔒 A new home for live data: the proxy moved to its own domain and now only accepts the kinds of requests the app actually makes.
• 🐛 Steadier live tracking on feeds with infrequent GPS updates. RIPTA also follows each vehicle along its real route path, so it catches up even when several stops pass between updates.
• 🎶 Nashville's WeGo, live: added in honor of Dolly Parton, with full live tracking from day one.

The full history is in RELEASE_NOTES.md.

🔭 Coming up

• 📍 Real GPS for Explore: awaiting trust from a LightOS update.
• 📡 Expanding current agency feeds: bringing live arrivals, vehicles, and service alerts to more of the agencies Pico Transit has schedules for today.
• 🚏 Adding more agencies, with help from the community.

🚏 Agencies and live data

Everything Pico Transit covers, and which live data it uses for each. A dash means Pico Transit doesn't use that data for the agency yet.

Southern New England

Agency	Schedule	Trip updates	Vehicle positions	Service alerts⁶
MBTA¹	✓	✓	✓	✓
RIPTA	✓	✓	✓	—
SRTA	✓	—	—	—
Merrimack Valley Transit	✓	—	—	—
Berkshire RTA	✓	—	—	—
Brockton Area Transit	✓	—	—	—
Cape Ann Transportation	✓	—	—	—
Cape Cod RTA	✓	—	—	—
Franklin RTA	✓	—	—	—
Lowell RTA	✓	—	—	—
MetroWest RTA	✓	—	—	—
Montachusett RTA	✓	—	—	—
Nantucket - The WAVE	✓	—	—	—
Pioneer Valley Transit	✓	—	—	—
Bay State Cruise Company	✓	—	—	—
Cuttyhunk Ferry	✓	—	—	—
Freedom Cruise Line	✓	—	—	—
Hy-Line Cruises	✓	—	—	—
Patriot Party Boats	✓	—	—	—
Seastreak	✓	—	—	—
Vineyard Fast Ferry	✓	—	—	—
Block Island Ferry	✓	—	—	—

Canada

Agency	Schedule	Trip updates	Vehicle positions	Service alerts⁶
LTC Ontario	✓	✓	✓	✓
STM Montréal	✓	✓	✓	—

New York City

Agency	Schedule	Trip updates	Vehicle positions	Service alerts⁶
NYC Subway	✓	✓	✓⁵	✓
LIRR	✓	✓	✓	✓
Metro-North	✓	✓	✓	✓
NYC Bus - Bronx	✓	✓	✓	✓
NYC Bus - Brooklyn	✓	✓	✓	✓
NYC Bus - Manhattan	✓	✓	✓	✓
NYC Bus - Queens	✓	✓	✓	✓
NYC Bus - Staten Island	✓	✓	✓	✓
NYC Bus - MTA Bus Company	✓	✓	✓	✓

Chicago

Agency	Schedule	Trip updates	Vehicle positions	Service alerts⁶
CTA	✓	✓³	✓³	—
Metra	✓	—	—	—
Pace	✓	—	—	—

Denver & Colorado

Agency	Schedule	Trip updates	Vehicle positions	Service alerts⁶
RTD Denver²	✓	✓	✓	✓
Bustang	✓	✓	✓	—
All Points Transit	✓	—	—	—
Avon Transit	✓	—	—	—
Baca Area Transportation	✓	—	—	—
Bent County Transportation	✓	—	—	—
Blackhawk and Central City Tramway	✓	—	—	—
Boulder County	✓	—	—	—
Breckenridge Free Ride	✓	—	—	—
Bustang Outrider	✓	—	—	—
City of Fountain Transit	✓	—	—	—
Clear Creek County Transit	✓	—	—	—
Core Transit	✓	—	—	—
Dolores County	✓	—	—	—
Durango Transit	✓	—	—	—
Easy Ride Transportation	✓	—	—	—
El Paso Fountain Valley Senior Citizens Program Inc.	✓	—	—	—
Envida	✓	—	—	—
Epic Mountain Express	✓	—	—	—
Estes Transit	✓	—	—	—
Garden of the Gods	✓	—	—	—
Greeley-Evans Transit	✓	—	—	—
Gunnison Valley RTA	✓	—	—	—
Home James Transportation	✓	—	—	—
Mountain Metropolitan Transit	✓	—	—	—
Parachute Area Transit System	✓	—	—	—
Prairie Express Transit	✓	—	—	—
Pueblo Transit	✓	—	—	—
RFTA	✓	—	—	—
Road Runner Transit	✓	—	—	—
Rocky Mountain National Park Shuttles	✓	—	—	—
San Miguel Authority for Regional Transportation	✓	—	—	—
Snowmass Village Transportation	✓	—	—	—
Steamboat Springs Transit	✓	—	—	—
Summit Stage	✓	—	—	—
Town of Mountain Village	✓	—	—	—
Town of Telluride	✓	—	—	—
Transfort	✓	—	—	—
TSC Transit	✓	—	—	—
University of Colorado Boulder	✓	—	—	—
Vail Transit	✓	—	—	—
Via Mobility	✓	—	—	—
Winter Park Transit	✓	—	—	—

San Francisco Bay Area (via 511.org)

Agency	Schedule	Trip updates	Vehicle positions	Service alerts⁶
BART	✓	✓	—⁴	✓
SFMTA Muni	✓	✓	✓	✓
AC Transit	✓	✓	✓	✓
Caltrain	✓	✓	✓	✓
VTA	✓	✓	✓	✓
County Connection	✓	✓	✓	✓
ACE	✓	✓	✓	✓
Santa Cruz METRO	✓	✓	✓	✓
Capitol Corridor	✓	✓	✓	✓
Emery Go-Round	✓	✓	✓	✓
Golden Gate Transit	✓	✓	✓	✓
Marin Transit	✓	✓	✓	✓
Mission Bay TMA	✓	✓	✓	✓
Mountain View Community Shuttle	✓	✓	✓	✓
MVgo	✓	✓	✓	✓
Petaluma Transit	✓	✓	✓	✓
Rio Vista Delta Breeze	✓	✓	✓	✓
SMART	✓	✓	✓	✓
SF Bay Ferry	✓	✓	✓	✓
San Leandro LINKS	✓	✓	✓	✓
SamTrans	✓	✓	✓	✓
Sonoma County Transit	✓	✓	✓	✓
Santa Rosa CityBus	✓	✓	✓	✓
SolTrans	✓	✓	✓	✓
WestCat	✓	✓	✓	✓
LAVTA Wheels	✓	✓	✓	✓
Tri Delta Transit	✓	✓	✓	✓
Angel Island Tiburon Ferry	✓	✓	✓	✓
Commute.org Shuttles	✓	✓	✓	✓
Dumbarton Express	✓	✓	✓	✓
Emery Express	✓	✓	✓	✓
FAST	✓	✓	✓	✓
Golden Gate Ferry	✓	✓	✓	✓
Presidio Go	✓	✓	✓	✓
SFO Airport	✓	✓	✓	✓
South San Francisco Shuttle	✓	✓	✓	✓
Treasure Island Ferry	✓	✓	✓	✓
Union City Transit	✓	✓	✓	✓
Vacaville City Coach	✓	✓	✓	✓
VINE Transit	✓	✓	✓	✓

Philadelphia

Agency	Schedule	Trip updates	Vehicle positions	Service alerts⁶
SEPTA Bus & Metro	✓	✓	✓	✓
SEPTA Regional Rail	✓	—	—	—

Northeastern Pennsylvania

Agency	Schedule	Trip updates	Vehicle positions	Service alerts⁶
County of Lackawanna Transit System (COLTS)	✓	✓	✓	✓

Nashville

Agency	Schedule	Trip updates	Vehicle positions	Service alerts⁶
Nashville - WeGo Public Transit	✓	✓	✓	✓

Cleveland

Agency	Schedule	Trip updates	Vehicle positions	Service alerts⁶
GCRTA	✓	✓	✓	✓

Los Angeles

Agency	Schedule	Trip updates	Vehicle positions	Service alerts⁶
LA Metro	✓	—	—	—

Puget Sound

Agency	Schedule	Trip updates	Vehicle positions	Service alerts⁶
King County Metro	✓	✓	✓	✓
Sound Transit	✓	✓	✓	✓
Pierce Transit	✓	✓	✓	✓
Community Transit	✓	✓	✓	✓
Kitsap Transit	✓	✓	✓	✓
Intercity Transit	✓	✓	✓	✓
Everett Transit	✓	✓	✓	✓
Washington State Ferries	✓	✓	✓	✓
Seattle Center Monorail	✓	✓	✓	✓

¹ MBTA subway trains that Pico Transit can't match to a scheduled trip are shown as a "closest match". Commuter rail positions and track numbers come from MBTA's V3 API.
² RTD Denver includes Bustang's routes and live vehicles.
³ For CTA, Pico Transit uses CTA Bus Tracker for buses (predicted arrivals and positions, matched to scheduled trips) and Train Tracker for 'L' trains, shown as a "closest match" for live arrivals and boarded trips. 'L' trains aren't drawn on the map yet.
⁴ Pico Transit doesn't show live BART vehicle positions; BART arrivals come from trip updates.
⁵ Pico Transit shows NYC Subway trains at their current stop rather than at a GPS position.
⁶ Service alerts are optional. Turn them on in Settings → Service alerts.

🗺️ What can it do?

• 🏠 Pick your agency from the welcome screen and Pico Transit downloads its schedule to your phone. The home screen then shows a clock in the agency's timezone and its name.

  

• 🗂️ Multiple schedules by region: New York City, Southern New England, Philadelphia, Denver, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Puget Sound group their agencies together. Turn on more schedules from the same region in Settings → "Additional Schedules", and tap and hold one there to make it your primary.

  

• 📅 Schedules: browse by Subway 🚇, Commuter Rail 🚆, Bus 🚌, or Ferry ⛴️, then pick a route, direction, and stop to see today's departures. Tap the Departures header to see tomorrow's instead.

  

  Routes for each supported agency:

  

• 🔗 Connections: tap any stop along a trip to see what comes through there next, across every platform of a station. Handy for planning a transfer on the fly.

  

• 📍 Explore: the closest stops to an address or landmark, nearest first. Set a default location in Settings → Explore and Explore opens there, looked up once and saved on your phone. Finding stops near you with GPS is opt-in and marked Testing, awaiting trust from a LightOS update.

  

• ⏱️ Live ETAs with On Time / Late / Early badges, whenever the agency's live feed is playing along nicely.

  

• 🗺️ Map: your stop and the stops around it, with live vehicles shown by mode (subway/light rail, commuter rail, bus, ferry). "See everything" shows every live vehicle in view, and you can choose which modes it shows. With "Track tapped stops" also on, tapping stops shows only the vehicles heading to, at, or leaving them.

  

• 👆 Gestures: tap and hold a stop or station name to jump to its live arrivals. On the map, double-tap a station to zoom into its platforms, and double-tap its name to zoom back out. On Trip Detail, a tap opens a stop's connections and tap-and-hold opens its arrivals; once you've boarded, a tap sets where you're getting off.

• 🚉 Stations: one entry per real station, with a map of just its platforms and gates. MBTA commuter rail trains show up on their track once one is assigned, usually 10-15 minutes before departure.

  

• ▶️ Board a trip: tap Play on Trip Detail, then tap the stop where you're getting off. When you arrive, Pico Transit celebrates with "You've reached your stop! 🎉" and shows that stop's upcoming arrivals.

  

• 👀 Show earlier stops (Settings): a boarded trip also lists the stops before yours, greyed out, so you can watch your vehicle approach.

  

• 🚋 Select Run, for CTA 'L' trains and MBTA subway lines: when Pico Transit can't match a live train to a scheduled trip for certain, it shows a "Closest match". Select Run lets you confirm or correct it by tapping the vehicle you're actually on.

  

• 🚦 Home screen trip status: while you're on a trip, the home screen shows your route, live ETA, stops remaining, and an optional progress bar.

  

• ⚠️ Service alerts (optional, turn on in Settings): detours, closures, and other service changes, for agencies with an alerts feed. The home screen shows your trip's alerts while you're on one. An alert icon marks affected routes, stops, and trips, and tapping it opens the full alert: what it affects, how long it lasts, and the details. New alerts can also pop up as they come in.

  

• ↩️ Jump back anytime: a Play icon in the corner takes you back to your trip from any screen, and the footer circle takes you home.

  

• ⚙️ Settings: switch agencies, turn on service alerts (off by default) and choose where they show, set Explore's location options and default location, pick a light or dark map, choose gestures, turn Select Run options on or off, download only over Wi-Fi (on by default), or clear the schedule cache.

  

• ℹ️ About: what data leaves your phone, and a legend of every icon Pico Transit uses.

  

🛠️ Building & running it

Pico Transit lives in tool/ inside this fork of the light-sdk monorepo. Follow the SDK's own setup first (GitHub token, Android Studio, and so on), then:

1. Open the project in Android Studio.
2. Run the :tool module on an emulator, or on the LightOS emulator. tool/lighttool.toml targets a real phone (com.lightos) by default; for the LightOS emulator, switch serverPackage to the commented-out emulator line and build with -DlightSdk.allowAltServerPackage=true.
3. Pick an agency, grab a coffee ☕ while the schedule downloads, and you're off.

📱 Getting it onto a real Light Phone III

Pico Transit has begun the submission process to become a released community tool on the Light Phone III dashboard.

For testers, it can be installed with ADB:

1. Build the APK with ./gradlew :tool:assembleRelease (see Building & running it).
2. Turn on Developer Options and USB debugging on your Light Phone III, plug it in, and run:

   adb install -r tool/build/outputs/apk/release/tool-release.apk

3. On the phone, allow "Any tools" in LightOS's tool settings. Light notes this setting carries privacy and performance risks.

A tester build and a Light-signed build are signed differently, so uninstall the tester build before installing a Light-signed one.

Happy transit-ing! 🚏🚌🚆

🧪 A few nerdy notes

• Live data goes through pico-transit-proxy, a small Cloudflare Worker (in its own repo). It only fetches a fixed list of upstream URLs, keeps every API key server-side, caches responses so riders share upstream requests, and accepts only the kinds of requests the app makes. It counts how often each feed is used, since agencies limit requests and some ask for usage numbers, and has no accounts.
• Feeds fetched over plain HTTP reach the app over HTTPS through the proxy, so the app never uses cleartext.
• Explore's GPS uses the Light SDK's location APIs. Address search uses Nominatim (OpenStreetMap), so please be kind to their free API! 🙏
• Stations are grouped by GTFS parent_station, so a big hub shows up once. Entrances, elevators, and escalators are left out of its platform map.
• Boarding is a saved reference, not a background tracker. Live feeds are only polled while Trip Detail or the home screen is on screen.
• Agency APIs alongside GTFS-RT: Pico Transit uses MBTA's V3 API for commuter rail tracks and positions, and matches CTA Bus Tracker data to scheduled trips by route and scheduled start time.
• "Closest match" pairs live CTA 'L' runs and MBTA subway trains that Pico Transit can't match exactly with the nearest scheduled trip, in order. These aren't plotted on the map yet.
• NYC Subway's 8 line-group feeds are merged by the proxy into one, and their trip IDs are decoded back to real scheduled trips.
• One upstream feed for the San Francisco Bay Area: the proxy fetches 511.org's regional feed once and slices it per agency.
• Map tiles come from CARTO through the proxy. Each 512px tile is cut into four, which keeps requests down and makes street names easier to read.

🙌 Credits

Thanks to Jose Briones for redesigning Settings and About into clearer nested screens, and for his continued help adding and testing Denver-area and Colorado support in Pico Transit.

Thanks to Guy Dupont on the Light team for adding LightConnectivity to light-sdk, the network-state API that made the "Only download over Wi-Fi" setting possible, and to the whole Light Phone team for making this SDK a genuine pleasure to build on and the LightOS developer community such a positive, supportive place to be.

Thanks to Claude (Anthropic) for extensive collaboration throughout Pico Transit's development, including learning Kotlin from scratch, implementing the "Only download over Wi-Fi" setting, and working through the codebase's comments and documentation together.

📄 License

The tool/ directory (Pico Transit itself) is licensed separately from the rest of the monorepo: see LICENSE-TRANSIT (MIT, © Christian Ferreira / CJFData). The rest of light-sdk remains under its own LICENSE (MIT, © The Light Phone).