Transport app Citymapper trials its own smart bus service in London | Hacker News Reader

Transport app Citymapper trials its own smart bus service in London

venturebeat.com

147 pointsseventyhorses76 comments

The article says:

> Imagine if every bus, boat, and train in London was kitted out with sensors and counters, with the data made available to third-party service providers — this could help cities manage transport infrastructure far more effectively.

And my reaction is, "Imagine if we had more buses and investment in public infrastructure to begin with."

In fairness, public infrastructure is already miles better in London than most U.S. cities. So the idea of tricked out buses with good smartphone integration seems a lot more realistic to me than if this were done in the U.S.

>> Imagine if every bus, boat, and train in London was kitted out with sensors and counters, with the data made available to third-party service providers — this could help cities manage transport infrastructure far more effectively.

> And my reaction is, "Imagine if we had more buses and investment in public infrastructure to begin with."

Well in London all the bus and train data is made available to third-party service providers. That is how citymapper exists

I think they meant it more along the lines of "I'd rather have my bus be on time than have my smartphone tell me exactly how late it will be."

Good luck with on-time buses in London traffic.

Having said that they're frequent enough if you're an out-of-towner they feel like they're running perfectly on time.

If a bus is late where I'm from it just vanishes - you can be watching Arriva's live map and its route blip will just disappear, enjoy waiting for the next one (minimum half hour wait, repeat if that one's running late too)

    > In fairness, public infrastructure is
    > already miles better in London than most
    > U.S. cities

Just most?

I did some work using Census 2011 data and created league tables for modes of transport across England and Wales. 56% of London residents commute to work by public transport. Next highest is Manchester at 31%. Unsure where that stands within an international league. I'd assume Tokyo would be higher. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1U9f-g8ETvljw-YAZbFpW...

With another ~15% for cycling/walking for London, it's an amazingly easy city to get around with transport options that stretch out far from the city itself (I travel 50 miles each way, taking 1hr15m when everything is working correctly).

I think the more interesting work I did was around the 20 min walk/20min cycle and the numbers of people still driving those distances. In London 164,079 within 20 minute walk, 584,749 within 20 minute cycle out of a total of 1,097,173 people that drive.

I'm in the process of writing this up but the implication is that we could get a large reduction in congestion and traffic pollution through building a good cycle network.

More interestingly we should probably move to a road charging system that dispraportionatly charges high for short car journeys.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nDCkK0LvkxqHLeYfd6wS...

Full set of spreadsheets: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4YARJgso6IxRjd1ZlNDZklGaX...

Here in Vienna/Austria 73% commute to work by public transport, walking and bicycle.

It's also miles better than most UK cities, which is occasionally a sore point. The rest of the country has to put up with Stagecoach buses which are less reliable at twice the price.

(Except Edinburgh, which also has publicly funded cheap buses)

London is an exception indeed. In most other cities it's a free for all between two or three companies, each with their own very poorly developed payment systems with little or no connectivity between them.

and in most towns it's a monopoly. Don't want to pay £4.20 to get into town and back? Walk.

London underground trains are fitted with sensors that can tell the weight of each carriage and there's a good chance that the data will be available via Transport For London's API, if it isn't already (I worked on the API two years ago)

City mapper has their own data sources but a lot is still from the public API that TFL provides for free with the reasoning that app developers will do a better job than TFL could.

Hmm. Making your app profitable by running a fleet of buses seems a bit... ambitious.

Background: Everybody in London uses Citymapper and nobody uses Google Maps. It is a great app. London Buses are also very good. As has been pointed out, they have GPS sensors. There is also a sophisticated infrastructure behind them, e.g. a control room that tells drivers to turn around and go back mid-rout if the buses are too unevenly distributed. See e.g. the BBC's Route Masters documentary if you can find it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b02znsx2

As has also been pointed out here, London Transport does not make a profit (although their public funding is constantly shrinking). So any new entrant has to be more profitable than them with a much smaller market share. Wonder if that is possible if you only differentiate yourself by technology. We'll see.

I feel like London is just the test city since it's where their offices are. Maybe the plan is to fine-tune the platform here and then expand to cities which are not as well served by public transport?

In their own blog post they specifically mention that (https://content.citymapper.com/news/1800/introducing-the-cit...)

> London is actually not that badly served, but other cities have major gaps

In my experience, Google Maps is really terrible outside the United States. It doesn't seem to understand that in the UK, a narrow country lane might have a speed limit of 60 mph, but nobody could ever drive that speed on it. It's constantly proposing insane detours off A roads onto back lanes obstructed by sheep and farm equipment.

Unlike Citymapper, Google Maps doesn't have a notion of multimodal transport: cycling to a train station, for example. Citymapper also doesn't "lose" your in-progress journey if you click the wrong thing or close the app.

Google Maps still doesn't have any concept of Boris Bikes either, London's bike rental scheme that's been active and popular for 5+ years. CityMapper has shown real-time bike and slot availability for years, as well as travel time estimates, to the point where I doubt any Londoner would bother using the official app anymore for bike rental (or any of the other third party apps).

"Unlike Citymapper, Google Maps doesn't have a notion of multimodal transport: cycling to a train station, for example" This is really neat. Also includes Uber-ing to a train station.

I don't think that's true. Google maps uses average speed on roads to estimate the fastest route, not the speed limit.

If they used the speed limit the app would never take traffic and other conditions into account, which it clearly does.

Having said that, I have experienced a crazy route now and then, but I think it's often caused by incorrect map updates.

Maybe they don't have enough Android-carrying traffic on rural lanes to calculate an average speed?

All I know is I frequently get really goofy route suggestions from Google Maps that seem totally clueless about the difficulty of driving narrow UK backroads.

> Google maps uses average speed on roads to estimate the fastest route, not the speed limit.

Even in the U.S. Google Maps regularly recommends things like unprotected left turns against heavy traffic to get onto a road with a speed limit which is 5-10mph higher, even when that road is equally congested.

At least it's not as bad as Apple maps which don't even provide an option for cycling. Sigh.

Ah yes, Google maps which either thinks I want to take three transfers to avoid walking 1km at the beginning and end of my trip, OR cycle the whole way, but that having a bike which can cover that 1km is preposterous.

> There is also a sophisticated infrastructure behind them, e.g. a control room that tells drivers to turn around and go back mid-rout if the buses are too unevenly distributed.

Yeah, it's really sophisticated; it means that if I catch a 3 bus signed for Crystal Palace there's about a 33% chance that it dumps me in Brixton to wait an extra twenty minutes in the rain, instead of taking me all the way home.

I'm pretty sure the described tactics should succeed at optimising expected travel time, but they (knowingly) do so at the cost of variability.

I regular get to experience the opposite: waiting 20min in the rain, at which point three busses arrive as a group.

Yet another extreme is low variability with high scheduled travel time, achieved by including a minute of slack at every second stop or so.

It's a result of an inherent instability in bus operations: As soon as the intervals diverge only marginally, faster busses become even faster, because there are fewer people waiting for them and vice versa.

"Everybody in London uses Citymapper and nobody uses Google Maps."

Well I live in London and actually prefer Google Maps directions over CityMapper which I think is slow to start and a bit slow in fetching and updating alternative routes.

I do like the "preferred tube car" to use based on your entry / exit tube station but after a while you don't need the actual app for this as they don't change.

Actual bus operations are run by private companies though (which is not the bit I would expect citymapper to be good at/interested in).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Buses#Bus_operations

Agree. Love Citymapper and love London buses and tube - this seems like massive overeach

This sounds a lot like the on-demand(ish) bus service called Bridj which just shut down here in Boston. [1] They promised popup bus routes just like Citymapper has, but it ended up that a lot of the "routes" they constructed were essentially missing gaps in the MBTA's bus/subway system.

The bus route generation tool that they mention seems to be very promising. Hopefully the realtime demand data is the piece that Bridj was missing, as it would be very cool to see this kind of stuff take off in other areas. I wish them all the success in the world - hopefully this works out for them.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/1/15501764/bridj-on-demand-b...

There's a functioning service called Chariot in Bay Area (and Austin, for some reason). [1] They seem to have quite a lot of routes, although most of them are just charter routes for the big tech companies.

[1] https://www.chariot.com/

I wonder if it is actually possible to make money in the commoditized transportation business. Virtually all government transportation organizations lose money -- luckily for them they're governmentally funded (MBTA loses money [1], which is relevant since there was recently a bus service in Boston that shut down).

[1] https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/02/28/mbta-shrinks-it...

There are quite a few exceptions to this. Sort the second table on this page by %age: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio

FWIW TfL in London has to break even across all modes (operationally, at least) by 2018.

You'll notice there is an exceptionally high correlation between operational returns and city density.

I wonder if they factor in the broader economic benefits of public transport (or costs of a lack thereof) into 'breaking even'. Cut bus services, more people drive, take longer to get to work, are now stressed, walk less, put more strain on the health care system. I'm guessing they don't, being politicians and all...

No, they don't. This is purely financial.

The more interesting question is if they provide greater value to the taxpayer than they cost.

If you live in any first world city (aka not the US), you know that's the case.

I realize you're trying to be snarky, but it's worth pointing out that the original definition of "First World" was the set of countries economically/politically aligned with the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_World

I love that the second world is implicitly the soviet countries, but it's disappeared from common use.

Even better, a lot of those countries in central Europe went ahead and leapfrogged the "first world" in terms of infrastructure and digital services.

First world is literally defined as aligning with the US. I have to guess you've never been to NYC, Chicago, San Fran, LA, etc if you want to snarkily dismiss them as "not first world"

Everywhere in the US outside of the borough of Manhattan has fairly awful public transit options. Feel free to sub in "developed country" to make the joke work better.

Is public transit the only measure of a developed city?

Perhaps public transit fulfills a different role in a country where car ownership is aspirational and currently at < 10% vs a country where car ownership is the norm and >90%

Los Angeles and Manhattan are still in the same country? The quality of public transport is related to density, public money and proper policies not the % of owned cars.

> Virtually all government transportation organizations lose money

So do highways — they're all investments which make things better for private citizens and businesses. You have to look at the total economic impact — i.e. not having public transit would entail either trillion-dollar freeway construction projects, the economic hit of massive traffic jams, or some combination of the two.

Cool initiative. I've yet to find a reason to switch from Transit to Citymapper in NYC, but it's always exciting to see pure tech companies (like Snapchat) try their hand at physical products.

The Citymapper folks are obviously very smart and I am stoked to see how this pilot project works out!

Interesting comment regarding Transit - as a Londoner who went to NYC for the first time last year I didn't even contemplate looking up another app; I just opened up CityMapper and it said "It looks like you're in New York. Switch City?", so it's pretty seamless.

A few years ago I'd definitely have trawled the App Store and I'm sure I'd have found Transit, but it just goes to show the power of a good, reliable interface and considered rollout to ensure you're always the go-to product if someone is aware of you.

This is my favourite thing about Citymapper. I use it everyday (multiple times) in London. Went to Milan for the weekend and was able to continue using the same app. It made figuring out another transit system incredibly simple. It's becoming like Uber for me in the sense that when I go somewhere Uber doesn't support getting around becomes something that takes quite a lot of figuring out.

I like Citymapper's hybrid/multi-mode directions, such as taking the train to Citibike -- I like its Citibike support in general, it has a good real-time overlay. Citymapper also does a good job with nights/weekend subway closures.

I don't just use Citymapper, though. I also have Google Maps and Transit installed. I prefer Google Maps' subway overlay/general map. I only use Transit for nearby train/bus schedules.

Is is simply a small buss run by a private company?

I don't understand why it is a "smart buss".

It's got a microchip in it.

"It’s got tracking software for real time integration with the app, passenger counting, and a driver app.

We built software for everything, including realtime operational control to driver management to scheduling systems. We’re reinventing how to think about all of these in the realtime world. We’ve taken systems that haven’t traditionally talked to each other and integrated them."

What does that mean? What is the result?

To me it seems like a van on a short bus route. What does all the technology add on top of this?

Bus on its way to you, your app says "There are 12 seats free, 10 standing on this bus" possibly even showing you which seats are free. Saves you catching a bus where you're crammed in like sardines.

Possibly even more functional uses such as "The wheelchair space is available"

But I'm going to get the bus anyway. If it re-routed me to alternative transport I suppose that would be helpful.

I really enjoy city mapper but find their "search" to be subpar in NYC. Search by address works fine, but if you search a place by name sometimes gives me random places in the other side of the country.

Yeah, its quite the same in London. In that case I switch to maps, but it isn't very often for me.

In London I'll often use Google Maps to search for the business that I'm looking for, then find the closest tube stop on the map and switch to Citymapper to navigate there.

Does anyone know how citymapper makes money; or if they aren't making any money yet what's their path to profitability?

They don't make any money at the moment. To date, the application is free and they have declined to include advertising in it.

According to Glassdoor they save money by treating staff like shit, make them work crazy hours and pay them inappropriately. But hey, you work for a great vision.

Why not sell your data to actual public transport to make their systems better?

Why must startups keep reinventing busses (without the poor people)

Nobody's buying, I'd imagine.

Busses without the poor people seems to be an American dream. In Australia and London it's "acceptable" to ride the bus, but in The Bay Area at least it seemed to be for "weirdos" only.

TFl has the data and City Mapper use a lot of it but with their own additional heuristics.

Anyone can write an app that consumes the data. https://api.tfl.gov.uk/

When they said smart bus I imagined they meant the routes were determined in real time according to where people wanted to go.

My guess is that this is a PoC to show the value of their data to other cities

Pay individually for a service that could be much better with collective funding. I dont see the good in this approach.

It seems the next step in transport disruption. If Uber and Lyft can revolutionize taxicabs, why not take a shot at sclerotic and inefficient public transport.

Public transport in London is neither sclerotic nor inefficient.

Indeed; it was one of the things I liked best about living there. The buses were spectacularly frequent, clean, cheap, and had convenient connections with tube and rail. A triumph, all things considered.

I love using the bus when I'm in London for work, none of the hustle and bustle of the tubes with approximately the same run time between places during the times I travel (rush hours)

They're a breath of fresh air... literally, because they're also all electric apparently.

Well, some of them are electric.

Most are hybrid diesels. :)

Ah fair enough, I've only seen/acknowledged the electric ones then, probably the route I take (Euston to Holborn and back)

Public transport in most parts of the world may be sclerotic, but is far more efficient at getting people where they need to go then privately owned automobiles or chauffeurs.

What does sclerotic mean?

"an inability or reluctance to adapt or compromise"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com