Moovit offers help navigating to ballot box, plus a gentle nudge

Israel’s Moovit, a startup that provides real-time information about public transportation schedules, has started operating a special service to encourage voting by helping users navigate their way to their polling station and reminding them on Tuesday to go out and vote.

The navigation service to the polling stations was in place on Monday, ahead of the general elections. the startup said.

Finding the polling station will be a simple process, Moovit said in a statement. Users will just have to insert into the Moovit app the number of their polling station, and the app will present them with all the public transportation options they can use to get to the station, along with walking and biking routes, the statement said.

Each route will also calculate how long it will take for users to get to destination and the public transportation schedules in real time.

A new initiative by the Central Elections Committee and the Transportation Ministry has made the use of interurban public transportation free for the elections, starting from 8 p.m. on Monday, the statement said, and until the end of the day on Tuesday, election day.

An illustration of the Moovit special Israel election app edition 2019, that will allow voters navigate their way to the polling stations thorugh the polling station number (Courtesy)

This is not the first time that Moovit was actively taking part in an election, the statement said. The app also helped US voters get to their stations in the 2016 elections.

Moovit is the first free, crowdsourced application to provide real-time information about public transportation schedules, thus helping users find the quickest way to their destination. The company was founded in Tel Aviv in February 2012.

The app is available in 44 languages both for Android and iOS phones and has some 400 million users globally, serving more than 2,700 cities in 90 countries, the statement said.