Edgemont Grads Develop a Better Commuter App

Two Edgemont grads, brothers Sam and Andrew Drozdov, have designed an app for the Metro North train schedule that they claim is faster, easier to use, and an overall better experience than all the alternatives. Since they launched it in late August, they have grown to over 1,000 monthly active users with a 5 star rating in the App Store.

The app, called Passenger-Commute can be downloaded here:

The two brothers have spent many hours commuting to and from the city and after a long time of searching for a friendly train schedule, they decided that they should just build their own.

Andrew graduated from Edgemont in 2009, studied computer science at the University of Michigan, and now is in grad school at NYU for computer science with a focus in artificial intelligence. At Passenger, he focuses on making it easy for the team to scale to new platforms and railroads.

Sam graduated from Edgemont in 2013 and is now a sophomore at the University of Maryland studying computer science. Last year he took the year off to study in Silicon Valley in a program called Make School. There he focused on the design of Passenger and making sure that users have an excellent experience every time they use Passenger. He also assists in software development.

Right now Passenger is a mobile app that make it easy to lookup the train schedule for people commuting on Metro North Railway. They are expanding to other platforms (web, Android) and other train stations (LIRR is coming soon). They believe commuting doesn't have to be something people dread doing everyday. They want to help and right now and think they can improve the daily experience by helping people decide what train to take.

Passenger offers a quick and easy way to look up the train schedule. There are many little details that make Passenger enjoyable, such as automatic switching of stations based on time of day and alarms that you can configure to go off before your train departs or arrives. You can also see the weather in the app and if you tap the weather, you get a daily inspirational quote.

They also offer 24/7 customer service and have a feature that lets users "Chat With Us" directly from within the app. Users often will offer feedback, feature requests, point out bugs, or even ask for directions while getting around the city (this really happened).

So far the brothers have gotten a great response from users. Download the free app on your iphone today (here) and see what you think or visit their website here.