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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

The one advantage these specialised apps can have is their hyper-specific transit suggestions, which are custom per city. For example, in London Citymapper will suggest to wait and board front/mid/back of the platform to align yourself better with exits at your destination.

Apple and Google tend to be slower to add suggestions like this because they scale poorly to other cities. But it's only a matter of time before they add them.

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> For example, in London Citymapper will suggest to wait and board front/mid/back

This never seems as useful as it should be because I'm missing a reliable way to know which direction a London Underground train will approach from?

There is a red stop light, but many stations have these at both ends of the platform. Is there some signage or other piece of infrastructure that gives it away?

When I was in Tokyo last week google maps had carriage suggestions

Google also shows prices there and not in London.

Google has a policy of requiring transit agencies to provide APIs and use standard formats, while Citymapper tries to make each city feel like its own app with lots of effort put in.

There's also a bit of jank where the model represents country-specific stuff. For example a handful of people floated the idea of women-only sections in busses in the UK, so Google categorized it as a country where users might want to know women-only-status. Now every single public transit route in the UK has a pill that says "No Women's Only Section".

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