Tuesday, May 09, 2017

CityMapper's Bus Service


CityMapper, the app that helps me get around London, is launching an experimental bus service for London, in conjunction with Transport for London (TfL).

It's a two day experiment, travelling in a loop between the City and Waterloo - see map - and while I won't be able to try it, I'm fascinated by it.

(It's also part of this new part of the 'online to offline' trend that has seen Deliveroo open commercial kitchens, Uber buy parking spaces, and of course online and app brands like Snapchat produce hardware).

It's based on data that they receive, and according to their blog post, they've noticed that current routes don't best serve how people want to travel.  (Remember this story from 2013, where mobile phone data led to a re-design of bus routes in the Ivory Coast).  CityMapper must have so much data on how their users travel, and could add real value here - their trial route is a new route,   (Possible caveat - it's not clear that CityMapper users are representative of the whole London travelling population).

It's going to be fascinating to see how this develops.  I'm also very impressed that TfL is open to new ideas.

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