I don’t know why it has to be like this. | Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge
Last month, I traded in my ludicrous New York City rent for a more affordable life in Hackensack, New Jersey. (Yes, it’s all my money got me.) Many of my friends who’d migrated to Jersey warned me about the NJ Transit app. It’s not good, they said. I didn’t take them too seriously. I was forged in the fires of the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s continually broken website circa 2001. After a seven-year stint in Tokyo navigating the labyrinthian Tokyo subway and bus system, what public transit app could ever befuddle me?
Hubris is a bitch.
Upon opening the NJ Transit app, I was bombarded with more menus than I knew what to do with. Nothing is uniformly named. App navigation is a matryoshka doll of ill-organized tabs. Would you like to…