What if you knew exactly when to walk out the door?

Indicator watches every platform in the New York City subway, thirty seconds at a time. From across the room, before you put your coat on, you’ll know exactly when your train is coming.

Live, right now, on a real station. Everything on it is the real product, including the map.

You’re in.

Welcome to the software preview of Indicator Transit — thanks for accepting our invitation. Pick your station and you’re done; it takes about a minute.

Set up your Indicator

Everything you need to know, in a glance.

No feed to scroll. No map to interpret. Nothing asking for your attention until you look at it. The color and the word say the same thing, so you can read the one you can see from where you’re standing.

Good service

Normal service

Longer waits

Service disruptions

Delays

Severe delays

It knows what normal looks like for this station.

Ten minutes between trains is an emergency on the L and an ordinary afternoon on the Staten Island Railway. A timetable can’t tell those apart. It only knows what was promised.

So Indicator learned every platform’s own normal from its own record, by hour and by day of the week, and judges what’s happening now against that. When it says longer waits, it means longer than this platform’s usual.

See where the trains are, at a glance, anywhere you have your phone.

It tells you why things are slowing down, and which way.

An announcement almost never says which direction is suffering. Indicator works that out—where the incident is, which trains have to pass it to reach you.

Delays. Signal problem at Mosholu Pkwy.

And it looks at the next twenty minutes.

A gap in the trains is visible in the predictions before it’s an announcement. When the next twenty minutes have a hole in them where a train should be, Indicator says so while you’re still indoors.

Longer waits likely.

Trouble arrives before the announcement does.

An incident starts as trains that aren’t moving. It becomes an announcement some time later—in our own record, usually around half an hour later, at the station where it began.

Indicator is watching the trains. Every train in the system, every thirty seconds, on all eight of the MTA’s live feeds, whether or not anybody has said anything about it yet.

And it writes everything down.

The MTA publishes the present. It does not publish the past. The feeds are a snapshot, and yesterday is simply gone.

Indicator looks at the past to make sense of the present. And it’s getting better by the day.

496stations judged, every five minutes

8live MTA feeds, read every thirty seconds

Every arrivalwritten down — not just the predictions

On your phone until it’s on your wall.

Indicator is meant to be an object: a small screen and a lamp that lives by your door, always on and single-purpose. No touchscreen, no voice control, nothing to unlock. The routes and stations you use here, chosen once.

That part isn’t in your hands yet. The software is, and it runs on the phone and the browser you already have—as a page, as a home screen icon, and on the lock screen.