The developers of the new MaizeBus app hosted a launch party at the Central Campus Classroom Building Thursday to celebrate the app’s official launch and recruit students interested in joining the current team of developers.
MaizeBus, created entirely by University of Michigan students, is a new transportation app designed to help students navigate the campus bus system. It was developed by Engineering junior Ishan Kumar, founder and CEO of MaizeBus, in addition to LSA junior Harvey Kyllonen, Engineering sophomore Andrew Yu, Engineering sophomore Francisco Yan and Engineering sophomore Ryan Lu.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Kumar said he wanted to develop an app that would resolve the shortcomings of the existing MBus app.
“MBus has been functional for a lot of years, but it’s gotten to the point where students have to juggle between multiple apps because MBus only shows when buses are coming and Apple Maps shows where they’re going,” Kumar said.“No app does both.”
Yu, who joined after hearing Kumar pitch the idea in an electrical engineering and computer science course, said in an interview with The Daily the team wanted to transform MBus into something all students could enjoy.
“I’ve been using MBus since I came here, and I always thought it was lacking in some features,” Yu said. “When he pitched it, I thought it was a good opportunity to be able to take it into my own hands.”
The group began building the app this summer with a focus on usability. Kumar said the app’s search feature, which allows students to look up their destination and see which buses can take them there using real-time bus tracking data, improves upon the capabilities of Apple Maps and Google Maps.
“Now you know that a bus you’re getting on is actually gonna be there, and you can actually see it on the map,” Kumar said. “You can see where it is, how long it’s taking, if it’s stuck at a red light — you can see all that while you’re trying to get to where you’re trying to go.”
In an interview with The Daily, LSA senior Camilla Easlick said she attended the event because she was interested in joining the development team and learned about it at Festifall .
“I immediately noticed in the first two, three days of school how frustrating it was that MBus didn’t work,” Easlick said. “I was walking at Festifall, and I got so excited when I saw that they already had people working on it. The promise of being able to actually contribute in a significant way made me (want to join).”
Engineering junior Serenity Metzger said in an interview with The Daily she was interested in joining the team after seeing the shortcomings of the MBus app.
“Over the past week, MBus has been down for Android devices, so I definitely was interested to see where they wanted to go with their product,” Metzger said. “A lot of new orgs are willing to teach and allow you to get involved. I wanted to join an app where I could make a difference and not just be a cog in the machine.”
Metzger said she is excited for the MaizeBus app to resolve the issues with the MBus app.
“One of the things I know with MBus that I had experienced over the past few years is that if you left the app and came back to it, the map would just disappear,” Metzger said. “Seeing things like that fixed, combining features of different apps, being able to search for a certain destination…is something that I’d like to see.”
Kumar said he hopes MaizeBus will continue to grow towards becoming the go-to bus app for the University.
“I really see MaizeBus becoming the big choice for students — the number one choice,” Kumar said. “Since it’s a student org, it’ll keep itself going long after we graduate for who knows how long. That’s the hope — to really bring together people that are talented and want to keep that vision going, to keep adding new and innovative features and keep changing the way students travel.”
Daily Staff Reporter Grace Park can be reached at gracepm@umich.edu.
