Michigan State University has one of the largest campuses in the nation, with more than 500 buildings on 5,000 acres. The Capital Area Transportation Authority (CATA) is the public transit service that services both Michigan State University and the greater Lansing area.

With over 30 routes, the CATA bus system is complex. Our mobile app CATAlyst enables riders using CATA to navigate the bus system easily and to arrive at their destination on time.

CATAlyst users select and view bus routes integrated within Google Maps. They can view all buses moving in real-time and all stops on a particular route. The arrival time of the next bus is displayed simply by selecting a specific stop.

Users can create and save weekly scheduled trips for classes and other events. CATAlyst maps out the best routes for a trip based on all available routes and the time of day.

CATAlyst sends a push notification to a user’s mobile phone, notifying them when to leave for a scheduled trip. The push notification includes the time it takes to walk to a specific bus stop from their starting location and the total estimated trip time.

CATAlyst is a mobile app written in Swift for Apple iPhones (iOS) and Java for Google Android phones using CATA real-time data. The server side utilizes RESTful APIs written in Java, using Maven and Spring Boot on an Ubuntu 16.04 Server with a MySQL database.