CityMapper in London offers a great experience on mobile. It works better than Google Maps for several reasons:
- one-click "Get me home"
- point-to-point directions include better hybrid instructions
- it displays bus waiting times in real-time
- displays your location *within* the bus route (between 2 stops for example)
- walking times are more accurate
For some reason, on the website, if I click on "Use my current location", it locates me at my home. But right now, I'm at work. Really weird... Would it mean that my previous location was somehow stored in Safari on my laptop?
While I've never tried it in large cities, I've found Google Maps provides location along public transit routes. One of my favourite features is that it has the option to just show a line with stops and throws out the map completely. I found this nice since I don't really care where the bus is going as long as it gets me to my destination at some point.
You can setup a Directions widget on your Android homescreen for a shortcut to 'Get me home'. Works well, but is a tucked away feature that I've never seen anyone else use.
I think there are a lot of usability problems with the start and end fields. I entered "57th and Broadway" into the start and saw the following results:
* Broadway & 57th Street, Woodside, NY
Broadway & 57th Street, Woodside, NY
* Broadway & 57th Street, West New...
Broadway & 57th Street, West New York,...
* West 57th Street & Broadway, New...
West 57th Street & Broadway, New York,...
I quickly clicked the first link, assuming it would be Manhattan (since the map was centered over Manhattan). I got directions from Queens.
I went back and tried again clicking the second result. This time I got directions from Union City, NJ.
I didn't get the right start point until the 3rd try, and that was only after trial and error. You incur a huge cognitive load to examine each of those three options and select the correct one, when other services I use all the time (Google Maps, Hopstop, etc.) seem to get it right on the first try.
You might say this is an unfair critique, because New York has a lot of streets with similar names... but it IS the biggest city in the US, and the application IS called CityMapper.
There are four different Broadways in New York (the Manhattan/Bronx one, and one apiece for the three remaining boroughs). Two of them (the Manhattan one, obviously, and the Queens one) intersect with some sort of 57th Street.
As a user, you probably want the Manhattan one unless you specify a borough. But as a developer, it's really hacky-feeling to hardcode "this one should immediately be preferred for no apparent technical reason".
I came across a similar problem once for searches that return identically named cities. It turns out that you get pretty close to DWIM if you rank the results by a combination of population and distance-to-current location (that is, you probably do want the smaller city if it happens to be really close).
People really like CityMapper for London, but I tried it for NYC and had to give up quickly. The routes were obviously wrong; it would often pick subways that were inefficient.
For example, preferring a route requiring two transfers taking 40mins over walking one block to another station and taking a subway that required only one transfer and takes 35mins; and I don't mean just that it preferred the inefficient route, it neglected to show the more efficient ones.
I went back to Google because I felt like I couldn't trust CityMapper's results.
I've used CityMapper on my phone a lot in London and Paris and can vouch for it. I particularly liked in Paris that it would recommend fastest routes that I would never have considered.
For example I was somewhere in Paris and I needed to get to Opéra and CityMapper pointed out that by walking to the end of the street there was a bus that would take me straight there. I would likely not have considered the bus as an option because of unfamiliarity with the system.
CityMapper has the most hilarious release notes I've ever read. I love getting an app updated - not because of the (awesome) new stuff they keep adding - but because I'm guaranteed a cracking read. It's interesting how writing in such a human voice builds positivity towards the app - I do think it's part of why I rate it so highly. It makes you want for a feature where you can find where the dev team are to have a pint with them...
hahaha with an endorsement like that, you know I just had to go and look them up. I found this [0] in which they portray themselves not as "a GPS alternative" (ugh, boring) but as out to "save lost humans everywhere!" That's me! I'm often lost in cities!
It also has a very cute picture of one of my personal favorite internet memes ;) I'd be willing to give this a shot...
The app was originally called BusMapper, and it was used to suggest working bus routes in London. Eventually it grew into handling all kinds of mass transit. (Due to processing power limitations, the first versions skipped every second bus stop to keep the graph traversal time manageable.)
The person who wrote the original version is working in my team.
I wrote much of the original BusMapper website and all of the iOS app. The only other person involved (other than Azmat, the CityMapper founder) was Mattias, who did all of the hard core routing algorithms - is he the guy on your team?
Interested to know what powers this. OpenTripPlanner[1] certainly provides all the features required but needs a revamped front-end. Like this, basically.
I believe they power themselves using open sourced data like that from Transport For London. I think they also plug into some other apis for things like cycling routes.
I use this in London on a daily basis to check bus times, as my commute can be faster by either bus or tube, depending on the bus wait times. Absolutely brilliant app, love the real time Borris bike availability and tube delay push notifications.
This is much more usable than google maps for manhattan (on my iphone), I'm very impressed! Google maps is a great app, but it's clunky for the specific use-cases of city-dwellers. I really like how you don't have to specify your mode of transportation a priori, because in cities there are usually five different ways to get somewhere with different tradeoffs. Instead, the app tells you the standard options (subway, bus, bike, walking), how long it will take, and how many calories you'll burn.
What I appreciate is that it then further breaks down the bike option into "bike hire" and "your own". It integrates well with the citibike system to show you where you might be able to pick-up and leave a bike.
I love the design of their web app, but it's just as unusable to me as their iOS app is. Sometimes typing in an address works fine, but other times (such as my home address), it bafflingly shows me a list of possible addresses that aren't the thing I just typed.
I understand as a programmer why that is (using Foursquare's venue API instead of doing any geocoding of their own) but it still makes it completely unusable, which I find sad since it has so many other great features and tiny polish details.
Question for CityMapper -- have you guys considered OpenStreetMap? What is currently wrong with OpenStreetMap that you would rather use Google? Would love to get some feedback back to the OSM community.
They do, at least in part. "We use OpenStreetMap for our walking routes." [1] I don't know why they don't use it for display maps (or why they don't attribute OSM at all).
Does nobody else find Foursquare maps API really, really sucks at finding things? I put in "Baltimore" and the first 20 results are outside maryland. I put "Baltimore, MD and there's a couple completely random odd things in maryland, as well as a ton of out of state listings. Uber uses the Foursquare API, and their location also totally sucks for finding simple things like an address. Maybe there's some way to search "the right way", but it's totally unintuitive to me.
I love CityMapper, I use it all the time. I just wish they fixed DLR times, as they are often completely off.
One other feature I'd like to see is to prefer a bit of a walk to change tube lines, instead of redirecting me to a bus or taking a much longer route. I happen to live in a location where it always does that when I try to get to the jubilee line :/
Sometimes I'm exploring a new area and don't necessarily want the fast route, but the path that takes me by interesting places. I'm not familiar with a service that does this though Field Trip and Foursquare give you interesting places around you as you walk.
The mobile app is excellent, but I do wish it would read locations from my calendar & contacts to save cutting and pasting. For the calendar it could remind me when to leave to get there on time...
It slightly baffles me there isn't an option to leave at a time in the future. I often need to find out what time I will arrive somewhere when I leave work to send people a time to meetup.
Great concept! Voted for San Francisco to be the next city. You should have paths that go over hills (for a robust walk), and paths that go around hills (for a flatter stroll) too! :-)
Ha and you should name those routes "For the fit" and "For the sedentary"
KIDDING!
If you did this it would be meaningfully different from Google Maps for me, the other benefits that others have said so far don't really resonate with me personally
