These guys think they've made the best transit app —  and it's for MCTS

The new app for the Milwaukee County Transit System has everything to get you from here to there on the bus: trip planning, real-time mapping and ticket purchase. 

The guys behind the app, Glendale-based Tixora LLC, think it's the best transit and ticketing app out there. 

"There are other apps that have tried to do that in the past —  trip planner, mapping, mobile ticketing," said co-founder Aaron Redlich. "But they end up with a clunky result."

The app, Ride MCTS, is available for free download. The iOS version of the application rolled out in November. The Android version launched last week.

"We think we came out with the best app on the market," said Brendan Conway, chief marketing and communications officer for the transit system. "I’ve downloaded and looked at more transit apps than most. We learned from others' mistakes."

Conway said Ride MCTS sets itself apart with an intuitive, modern design. 

"It doesn’t feel like a public sector application," he said.

Tixora is responding to requests for proposals from transit agencies across the country. Redlich said Tixora has submitted at least a half-dozen applications. Some of the systems are "much larger than MCTS," Redlich said. 

"There's unanimous interest in what we’re building because it’s quite different," Redlich said. 

The co-founders have pored over reviews and ratings in the app store of similar applications from other companies and transit agencies. By their analysis, Ride MCTS is the highest-rated mobile ticketing app in North America. The three co-founders Redlich, Xuan Zhang and Buzun Chen, met while students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

Since its November launch, Ride MCTS has been downloaded about 4,000 times. About 150 tickets are bought a day while around 400 people log on to track the bus or plan a trip. In a typical day, 130,000 rides are taken on Milwaukee buses. Conway said MCTS is happy with those numbers so far.

"We really haven't done a lot of promotions," he said. 

The Milwaukee transit system first partnered with Tixora to create mobile bus tickets for the Freeway Flyer to Summerfest in 2016. About 30,000 tickets were purchased through that app during the music festival.

The co-founders' first project together was an app for students to more efficiently get around the UW-Madison campus. 

"We didn’t want to wait outside in the cold," Redlich said. 

That app has been downloaded 50,000 times and has 5,000 daily active users, Redlich said. 

By the end of the year, Tixora wants to triple the size of its team from the three co-founders to nine employees. The goal for Tixora is to move beyond making apps to use the data gathered to improve routes, timing and transit development. 

Tixora has won more than $30,000 in prize money through entrepreneurship competitions in Wisconsin. 

Sarah Hauer can be reached at shauer@journalsentinel.com or on Twitter @SarahHauer and Instagram @HauerSarah.