MBTA Transit Planner

Inspiration

Navigating Boston’s transit system can be stressful—especially when delays cause missed connections and uncertainty. After experiencing unreliable transfers and last-minute reroutes ourselves, we wanted to build something smarter than a static route map. Our goal was to create a planner that understands real-time conditions, predicts connection success, and supports riders with AI-powered guidance.

How We Built It

We built the MBTA Transit Planner as a modern, real-time web application:

• Frontend: React + TypeScript, styled with Tailwind CSS
  
• Mapping: Mapbox GL JS for interactive live transit maps
  
• Data: MBTA API + GTFS real-time feeds
  
• AI: Gemini API for a natural-language transit chatbot
  
• Backend: Node.js
  
• Real-time: WebSockets for live alerts and delays
  
• Performance: Redis caching for fast route calculations
  
• Deployment: VS Code

Routes are ranked using reliability logic based on delay, walking time, and transfer buffers, for example:

Built With

• css
• gemini
• github
• html
• javascript
• mbta
• node.js
• tsx