What we’re doing to help with the fight against Coronavirus (COVID-19)

Whiz
2 min readMar 17, 2020

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With the novel coronavirus sweeping the globe, many transport networks are doing everything they can to fight the virus — from increased station and vehicle cleaning to reducing services. If you need to travel to the supermarket or to work (and many do, including frontline emergency workers) we want to help.

From today, we are updating our app with the latest news and reports from local transit networks to keep our customers informed. For example, the MBTA in Boston and ETS in Edmonton have started a reduced Saturday service for many routes, while others like the MTA in New York City are keeping regular timetables, working hard to keep stations and vehicles clean. You’ll find the latest news as soon as you open the app, and we will keep you updated when new developments arise, using push notifications when necessary.

Current notices for Boston (left), NYC (center) and Sydney (right)

We’ve been working hard to get our most-requested feature finished: line status alerts. Soon you can get notifications when your saved lines are experiencing issues. We had originally planned for this to go live in May, but we’ve pushed that forward so you can get line status alerts this month. You’ll see an update in the App Store and Google Play store soon.

We use transit every day, like many of you, and we see how hard the drivers, cleaning and support staff work every day to keep things running during what must be a very difficult time for so many. If you can, support them by avoiding public transport if you can help it, and say thank you to those hard-working staff that make transit possible.

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Whiz

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