How we verify

Starna explains how you actually ride transit in a given city. Fares and payment rules change quietly, and stale information is useless once you are standing at the gate. This page explains how we check what we publish, and how we notice when it goes out of date.

Where our information comes from

We take information in this order of preference.

1. Official operator data — official GTFS feeds (the standard format for timetables, lines and stops) and official APIs. Route maps and operating hours are built from these
2. Official operator websites — fares, how to buy tickets, and which payment methods work: the things that are not published as data
3. Photos — first-hand photos taken on location by us and our family come first. Until we have our own for a city, we use openly licensed photos from sources such as Wikimedia Commons, always showing the photographer and the source. Captions are checked against the guide text and official information; claims without a source are dropped
4. Third-party sites — used only to cross-check. We never publish something on their authority alone

Route maps are drawn from official data rather than copied from official map images. Apps are shown as brand colours and text, never as icon images.

Every page carries a verification date

Every guide shows when it was last updated, with a three-step dot that reflects how long ago that was.

• Green — updated within 30 days
• Amber — updated within 180 days
• Grey — older than that, and queued for re-checking

Timetables are managed as dated revisions: the page states the date the data was captured and always links to the official source. Approximate fare conversions carry the date of the exchange rate they used.

Our rule is that stale information is never hidden. If something has not been checked recently, the page says so.

"Unknown" is not written as "not accepted"

Card acceptance is recorded in three states: accepted, not accepted, and unverified. We do not collapse this into two.

If an operator does not say whether JCB works and we have not been able to confirm it on location, that is unverified — not not accepted. Getting this wrong costs you real money at the gate, so we say plainly when we do not know.

Where AI is used, and where it is not

We use AI to pull fares and operating hours out of long official pages, and to draft guides. Extractions go through automated validation (format, vocabulary and source checks), combined with human review, before they go live.

Link destinations are never written by AI or by automated pipelines. Every outbound URL is managed by hand, so that no automated process can redirect you somewhere we did not choose.

How we notice change

We re-fetch the official pages we track on a schedule and compare them for changes. Anything that changed goes into the re-verification queue.

Even so, the ground sometimes changes before the official site does. If something here does not match what you found, please tell us. We read every report, check it, and correct the page.

And still — confirm with the operator

Use Starna to prepare, so you are not working it out at the gate. Fare revisions and engineering works can outrun our checks. For fares and live service information, please confirm with the operator's official information. Every page links to it.