Citymapper Smartbus — Reinventing the bus for the smart city era

On-demand, dynamic public transportation routes are clearly the future. We now have the means to gather the data and update routes in real time. So much for set-in-stone archaic bus routes...! Once you have the data, all roads become unlocked! #punIntended From CityMapper: First we built an app to help you get around town, using open data. But we found the data needed fixing, so we built tools to do so. We also built tools to analyse the data and learned a lot about how people are moving around. When we studied the existing public transit routes, we realised that they don’t always serve people best, nor evolve quickly enough to accommodate changes in the city. We built an ultimate tool (codenamed: Simcity) to evaluate routes utilising our demand data and routing. We found we can figure out how to improve existing routes in all of our cities. We can also identify new and better routes. ... We’ve helped people figure out which bus to take. When it arrives. How long it takes. When to get off. Now it’s inevitable that we help make them work better. We don’t have to do it all ourselves, we’re glad to partner with others. We built an easy to use app by being users ourselves. So we feel the best way to build software for buses is to run buses ourselves. And learn from running some public experiments.

Citymapper moves beyond its current focus of 'just' getting us and continuously improving the best public transport data by launching a temporary free bus service in London. CMX1 will run on May 9 and 10 on a Circulator route around Blackfriars and Waterloo bridge. And the bus is of course not your standard bus but full of little tech details. A really interesting move staying true to their mission.