The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is looking to the creative tech community in the Big Apple to help make the daily commute a bit easier. NY1's Technology reporter Adam Balkin filed the following report.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is looking for help in making the subway and buses easier to navigate via handheld electronic devices.

"I'll tell your right now, I want every New Yorker to be able to look at their mobile device and know when the next train or bus in coming," says MTA Chairman Jay Walder.

So, the MTA and Google organized this week a meeting between transit officials and mobile apps developers.

"The reality is the MTA is good at running trains and buses. [Apps] require a whole different set of skills. It's not our core strength," says Walder. "Let's bring in other people, let them do it and they'll do it more cheaply, more effectively, more quickly than we'd be able to do it."

To help that process, the MTA are providing developers with service information and data, free of charge. In turn developers like those from ExitStrategyNYC are already using the data to incorporate new, upcoming features.

"We really did one thing and one thing really well, which is tell you where to stand on the train so when you get on the train. If you're going up to Columbia [University], it'll say, 'Get on the second car, third door,' and you stand there and you hop off right in front of the staircase," says Jonathan Wegener of ExitStrategyNYC. "Our next version will have subway train times and we're going to have MTA service advisories."

While many of the apps, like ExitStrategyNYC, do require high-end phones like iPhones or BlackBerrys, the MTA is pushing device-independent apps in order to better serve people of all levels of income and tech savviness.

One such app is CooCoo, which works on phones that hit shelves 10 days ago or 10 years ago.

"So if you're going from Penn [Station] to Huntington, [Long Island,] you would simply text 'Penn to Huntington' and send it to '266266' which spells 'CooCoo,'" says John Tunney of CooCoo. "In five seconds or less, you get a completely clean screen with the next five times, with delays and details if any."

Roadify, a text messaging-based application, uses crowd sourcing to get better estimated times of arrival.

"Any time somebody hops on the bus or sees the bus as it goes by, they can do what we call a 'give,' which is simply sending a text message to us about where that bus actually is at that moment," says Daniel Robinson of Roadify. "Anyone that is requesting information from us, we call that the 'get.' We provide them with the three most recent MTA schedule times, as well as a real-time 'Roadify Report ETA,' based on someone up the line giving that information."

As an added incentive to get more transit apps out for public consumption, the MTA will be running three apps contests this fall.