iPhone App Review: Find A Metro DC

Between maps, trip planning, bus and train predictions, and more, it takes a number of apps to bring the full range of transit information to an iPhone user’s fingertips. Find A Metro DC aims to correct this by bringing everything together in one place.

I currently use DC Metro for the system map and next train info, HopStop for trip planning, NextBus mobile site for MetroBus info, circulator.dc.gov for Circulator bus info, and the WMATA mobile site to fill any gaps. Clearly this is not an ideal situation; all my mobility apps and bookmarks take up a full quarter of my home screen.

My hope was that Find a Metro DC might finally be the app that could aggregate all these functions into one. Certainly the screen shots in the iTunes App Store looked promising.

The verdict: It has many rough edges and some features that are more incomplete than useful, and I’ll be hanging on to a few other apps, but a number of great features and potential for improvement make Find a Metro DC worth the 99¢ investment.

When you open Find A Metro DC, you are greeted by a utilitarian home screen menu with 10 options. The map, 5 closest stations, alerts, and points of interest provide very useful functionality, while others, such as the trip planner and Metrobus and Circulator arrivals, currently more accurately represent a potential for useful features in future versions. You can view all of the screenshots here.

Map: Clicking on Map brings up a slightly zoomed view of the standard WMATA Metrorail map. Though there is no indication, I quickly discovered the map to be clickable: touching a station circle (and in apparently random cases the station name) will give you a screen with the standard Next Train display.

Two nice features in Find A Metro, are the buttons Show on Map and Get Directions. The first opens an in-app Google Map showing the station location. The second leaves Find A Metro DC and opens Maps with the station address in the destination field.

The most frustrating thing about the map is how difficult it is to tell where you’ve clicked. As mentioned above, some station names are clickable, others aren’t, with apparently no rhyme or reason: you can click “Branch Ave” but not “Suitland” or “King Street” but not “Braddock Road.” In this case I prefer how the DC Metro App handles map clicks: a gray box appears covering the station and name you have clicked.

5 Closest Stations: This is the best feature on this app by far. Click this menu item and it will use your iPhone’s location to list the closest stations, including an icon showing which lines serve them and exactly how far away each is.

The only improvement I could suggest here would be a button, like the one on a station’s Next Train page, to show all of them on a map. Groupon’s app has something similar where you can view the location of all the deals you’ve purchased as Google maps pins in relation to your current location.

Favorite Stations: You can create a list of your favorite stations so that you don’t have to resort to the map or the complete list every time. Again the list has a nice icon next to each name indicating which lines serve that station.

The most frustrating thing on this screen is that when you go to add a station to the list, you have to scroll through the entire list of Metro stations. It’s only 86 stations, but a search box, or the alphabet on the right like in the DC Metro app, would help tremendously.

All Stations: The name says it all. This one is doesn’t serve much useful purpose, but rather than removing it, I would put it at the bottom of the menu.

Metrorail Alerts: If there’s one thing that Metro has plenty of that would be real handy to access on the go, it’s alerts. Kudos to the app author for making the connection.

A colleague of mine who uses a mobility device, though, pointed out that only the rail alerts are displayed and incorporating elevator and escalator outages would be hugely helpful. I have to agree.

Trip Planner: This feature delivered by far the biggest disappointment of all. When I saw the screen shot in iTunes that showed a trip planner option, I was excited that I might not have to use the Metro mobile web version anymore.

Unfortunately, the Find A Metro DC trip planner only lets you query a trip from one Metro station to another. No addresses, no buses, no walking. On top of that, once again, you have to use a scroll wheel to scroll through all 86 stations.

The bottom 30% of the screen contains a scalable, movable metro map, but the amount of screen real estate devoted to it is so minimal it’s more disorienting than helpful. This whole feature is not yet developed enough to be useful to a regular Metro rider or to any tourists with at least a passing familiarity with the system or how to read a transit map. If the map were clickable it might have more value, but even that’s debatable. I’ll be keeping Hop Stop until door-to-door trip planning is available through Find a Metro DC.

Metrobus Arrivals: I had high hopes for this feature as well, billed as an integration of NextBus into a metro app.

The screen has three slots to enter a NextBus stop number, which confused me at first. On my second use, I realized that each slot saves the previously entered stop number. For your convenience there is also a box next to each stop number where you can assign a name to saved stops.

Again, compliments to the author for aggregating more disparate data into one place, but while the idea is good, the execution is not as good. The name box is so small that you can only fit about 8 characters in it — hardly enough for an intelligible name, especially if you use stops outside of the numbers and the first alphabet. For the two stops near my apartment I use most, I struggled to come up with short enough labels to fit, finally settling on “WB Pa/24” & “EB Pa/22.”

Yet, with so much empty screen real estate, why not put the name boxes on the line above or below allowing for legitimate labels like “WB 30s Penn & 24th NW?” To make matters worse, the NextBus stop number box is 70% wider than the name box even though the bus stop numbers are a fixed number of digits! Still, it’s a nice feature.

The biggest problem with the NextBus feature in Find a Metro DC is in searching for stops you haven’t already saved or aren’t currently standing at. To do that, you have to search a saved stop number, then go through the NextBus web system to choose another Route, then direction, then stop. At the very least the bottom of the main Metrobus Arrivals page could have a “Find a stop” link that takes you to the default NextBus homepage.

Circulator Arrivals: This is another good idea but with incomplete execution. The app uses your phone’s current location and lists literally every Circulator within half a mile, regardless of what direction it’s heading in. On the positive side, each Circulator location is color-coded to match the route color on the official Circulator maps, a version of which you can view in the app.

Points of Interest: This last feature, which started out as intriguing, has improved to become one of the best in the app over the last two updates since I’ve been using it. When I first downloaded the app, it was just a digitized version of Metro’s official Places of Interest list on pocket maps and visitor’s guides.

Since then, it has become a significantly more complete, interactive and best of all, location-based, list of things to see in DC and how to get there on the Metro. Like the 5 Closest Stations option, the list is generated in order of growing distance from your current location. Click on a site and a dialog box pops up listing the nearest Metro stop. Once you close the box, the app loads the Wikipedia page for the particular point of interest in a nice in-app browser with buttons to get directions to or show the place on a map.

While this feature is distinctly more useful for tourists, it adds something to the app that none others have, at least as far as I know.

All in all, Find a Metro DC still seems somewhat of a work in progress. A number of features are fundamentally based on outstanding ideas but are incomplete in their execution. Still, at $0.99, this app is worth it just for combining the functionality of several other apps and mobile sites into one. I’ve already deleted my DC Metro app, and my NextBus and Circulator icons.

On top of that, the recent rapid evolution of Points of Interest shows how one of these less useful sections could quickly turn into a star. If this app had a little bit more visual appeal and added the features I suggested, it would easily be worth $5.

Want to give the app a try yourself? We have ten free promo codes courtesy of the author; the first ten people to request them get one. Leave a comment below saying you’d like one, and we’ll contact you using the email address you list in the email address field (which isn’t visible to anyone but site administrators).