I live and swear by Citymapper[0] for all cities that it supports. No other app I've used has been as good for public transport as Citymapper has been.
I really hope one day one of these city transport organisations either buy it out, push for it, or license their tech.
For NYC specifically I've been burned many times by Citymapper. It is trying to be clever and parse the messages about service changes, but does it all wrong and in the end gives you wrong directions, leaving you stranded. Sometimes it doesn't show the alerts by MTA at all.
Now that the MTA app is so good and has achieved feature parity with Citymapper, I prefer that for 90% of the time. It doesn't have multi-modal (eg subway + citibike) and doesn't show estimates of uber/lyft prices, but those have not been very useful in my experience.
Citymapper is still ok to quickly check upcoming train or bus departures.
Via is primarily SaaS where their customers are cities themselves to help digitize and optimize their public transit networks. You might be thinking of: at one point in time and in some places, Via operated ride shares, but that's not their main business and they discontinued much of that during the pandemic.
The citymapper acquisition notes really fit Via's strategy of being able to help cities unify and optimize transit infrastructure.
Me too - no experience of it in NYC but I swear by it in London and it’s also been fantastic in other European cities. Far more reliable and accurate than Google Maps.
I really hope one day one of these city transport organisations either buy it out, push for it, or license their tech.
[0] https://citymapper.com/