Riders of New Jersey Transit, the country’s third-largest public transit system, will now able to tell how crowded an incoming bus or train is before it arrives, with a new tool that was added to the agency’s mobile app on Monday.
The new feature is designed to help riders avoid waiting for overcrowded vehicles, potentially reducing the spread of COVID-19 in the process. For now, NJ Transit rail riders that download the agency’s travel app can voluntarily share how crowded they think their train is — light, medium or heavy ridership — through a crowdsourcing option on the app, though officials say that will eventually be phased out in favor of using handheld ticket validation devices to update the crowd level.
