DMV Transit is an independent, unofficial trip planner for DC, Maryland and Virginia. It is not affiliated with WMATA or any transit agency. It doesn't sell your information or show ads.
What we keep
| What | Details | Kept for |
|---|---|---|
| Trip searches | Start and end rounded to about 100 meters, the nearest stops, the trip options shown, and the names of landmarks or stations you pick. Never street addresses or what you type. | 1 year |
| Questions to the assistant | Your question and the answer. Email addresses and phone numbers are removed automatically before saving. | 1 year |
| Page activity | Which trip options and panels you open, the kind of device, and the name of the site that sent you here. | 1 year |
| Rider reports | The report you write. Other riders and the assistant see it for a few hours. | 1 year |
| Your account, if you make one | Your username, your password stored only as a scrambled (hashed) value, and the places you save (names, addresses and dates). Never linked to the records above, and saved places never appear in links. Your trip plan (days, places and times), if you plan with the assistant. | Until you delete it, or 2 years after your last visit |
The records above use an anonymous code to tell one visitor's activity from another's. The code is made from your IP address in a way that can't be reversed; we don't store IP addresses themselves. Our web server's request log shortens addresses to their network (for example 203.0.0.0) before writing them.
Your location
Your browser asks before sharing your location. We use it only to find stops near you and plan your trip, and we keep it only as part of a trip search, rounded as described above.
Services that receive information
- Google Analytics counts visits. It sets cookies and receives your IP address under Google's privacy policy.
- Google Maps finds the places you type in the search boxes, and the restaurants and attractions the assistant looks up for you. Our server sends it what you search for and, for a search near somewhere, that point; your browser doesn't contact Google for this.
- Anthropic (Claude) answers questions to the assistant and checks rider reports before others see them. It receives the question or report text and, when a trip is on your screen, its start and end names and the option you picked (the stops, lines and times), so the assistant knows which trip you mean. Not your exact location.
- Transitland provides some live departure times. It receives stop codes, not anything about you.
- Amazon Web Services hosts the site.
The map itself is served from our own server.
The MCP server for AI assistants
Anyone can connect an AI assistant (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and others) to our MCP server at https://dmvtransit.com/mcp, without an account. It keeps no record of the questions or places it's asked about. Your network address is used only in the server's memory to apply request limits, and isn't logged or stored. Addresses and landmarks it's asked to find are sent to Google Maps or geocode.maps.co. What the assistant itself keeps is up to the company that runs it. People given an API key are known to us by the name the key was issued to, with a count of requests and when it was last used.
Cookies and browser storage
- Google Analytics cookies, as above.
- If you sign in, a sign-in cookie that keeps you signed in for 90 days. It can't be read by page scripts.
- The assistant keeps a conversation code in your browser tab, cleared when you close it.
Signing in
Accounts use a username and password; no email address is needed. Your password is stored only in scrambled (hashed) form, so nobody, including us, can read it. When you make an account you get a recovery code, the only way to reset a forgotten password; keep it safe. After several wrong passwords an account is locked for 15 minutes. We send no email: no newsletters, no marketing.
Deleting your information
- Your account: open My places and choose Delete my account. Your username, password, saved places and sign-ins are removed at once.
- Everything else: it's deleted automatically after one year. To ask for earlier removal, contact the site's creator below. Because records aren't linked to your name, include roughly when you used the site.
Contact
DMV Transit is built by Kaleb Neal. Reach Kaleb on LinkedIn.