What it does
Nearby is what the app shows you before you have asked for anything. Every line you could catch around you, closest first, with the next departure in each direction and how long you have.
It covers what runs near you rather than one agency's slice of it: the bus, the streetcar, the subway and the commuter train are in one list, sorted by distance, not grouped by who operates them.
It is the fast answer to a question that is not really a trip: not "how do I get to the far side of the city" but "what is leaving, and do I need to run".
How it works
The list is anchored to a point on the map. That starts as where you are, and you can drag it anywhere: the departures follow, which is what makes it useful for somewhere you are about to be rather than only where you are standing.
Reroute looks a short distance around that anchor first, and widens the search when a suburban corner turns up too little. The list says which distance it actually searched, so a thin list is legible as "there is not much here" rather than as a bug.
Every row shows the soonest departure per direction, and per branch where a route splits, because a different branch is a different destination rather than a later bus. Times carry a live marker when they come from a vehicle's real position and read as scheduled when they do not.
What one row is telling you
A departure row is dense on purpose: it is meant to be read in the second between looking up from your phone and deciding whether to run. Here is every part of one.
- The line
In its own operator's colour, as a roundel where the line has one. It is the same badge the app draws on the map and in a route, so a line looks like itself everywhere.
- The direction
Each direction is its own group under the line, both visible at once. There is no flip control to discover, because half a departure board is not an answer.
- The branch
Marked where a route splits. A different branch is a different destination, not a later bus, so it gets its own row rather than being folded away.
- The countdown
Minutes while it is close, a clock time once it is further out. It ticks rather than waiting for the next refresh.
- The live mark
This departure is coming from a vehicle whose position is actually known. Without the mark you are reading the published schedule, which on a bad night is a different level of confidence.
Make it yours
Every setting below is named exactly as the app names it, with where to find it. None of it needs an account.
- Subway, GO, UP Express, StreetcarsSettings → Map
- The overlay cards at the top of the Map section, switchable line by line. What you turn on here is what the map around the anchor draws, which is how you go from a list of departures to seeing where those lines actually run.
- Service alertsSettings → Map → Live data
- Puts shutdowns and slow zones on the same map, so a line that is quiet near you is visibly quiet for a reason.
- ThemeSettings → App
- System, Light or Dark. The map follows the theme, which matters more here than anywhere else in the app, because this is the screen you open on a platform at night.
- Max walk timeSettings → Trip preferences → Trip length
- A routing preference rather than a Nearby one: it decides how far a planned trip may make you walk to a stop. Nearby always shows what is genuinely close, whatever you set here.
Nearby is deliberately almost setting-free. It answers one question and the answer should not depend on configuration you have forgotten you changed.
Get more out of it
- Drag the anchor ahead of yourself
Drop it on the station you are walking to and the list becomes the departure board for a place you have not reached yet. Recentre with the control in the header.
- Open a direction, not the card
Tapping a direction opens the rest of the day for that route and direction. The card itself is the summary; the direction is the timetable.
- Watch for the live marker
A departure with the live glyph is coming from a vehicle that actually exists somewhere on the route. One without it is the schedule's best guess, which is a different level of confidence on a bad night.
- Check the distance in the header
It tells you how far Reroute had to look. A list that widened to a kilometre is telling you something true about where you are standing.
- Union has its own board
For commuter rail out of Union, the live departure board with platforms and cancellations is reachable from the alerts screen, and it is the one that will tell you the track.
Good to know
- It needs a location, or an anchor you place
Before a location fix lands the list says it is finding you rather than claiming there is no transit nearby, because those are very different statements and only one of them is true.
- Live coverage is not uniform
Some vehicles are tracked well, some are matched from GPS onto the route and some are not tracked at all. Rows are marked live only where the data really is, so an unmarked row is honest rather than broken.
- A dropped refresh does not blank the list
Departures refresh on a timer while the screen is in front of you. If a refresh fails, what is already on screen stays, because a stale countdown is more use than an empty panel.
- Late at night the answer may be tomorrow
When nothing is left in the departure window but there is service later, the list says when the first one is rather than declaring there is no transit here.
Under the hood
Departures are built from the loaded GTFS schedules with realtime laid over them per stop and trip, using each operator's live source: next-train predictions for the subway, live vehicle predictions for buses and streetcars, and standard realtime trip updates elsewhere. Where a live source knows about a trip the static schedule does not, the live one wins.
Only the active service is considered, resolved against the schedule's own calendar and its exception dates in Toronto local time, which is what stops a weekday-only trip appearing on a Sunday board.
The list refreshes on a thirty second cycle and stops refreshing entirely while the tab or app is in the background, then catches up immediately when you come back. A screen that stays mounted for a whole commute should not poll a server for countdowns nobody can see.
When the schedule data is missing altogether the app falls back to a hardcoded set of subway stations, which keeps the map and the station search alive rather than presenting an empty network.