City Mapper

[adrian_turtle]

There’s a transit app called City Mapper, that I used to use. (For values of “used to” ending very emphatically this morning.) It showed a variety of transit routes based on where you were, comparing them with each other and with biking and walking. It plans a route based on the schedule and then uses GPS to say how far away the next buses are coming. Useful for “this bus is crowded, I’ll take the next one in 5 minutes” or “the next one won’t be for half an hour.”

This morning I got up early to get to Somerville because there were things I wanted to do in the attic before meeting people at 11. Thanks to City Mapper, I just wasted an hour trying to make a bus connection that does not exist. The bus is not going through that neighborhood today. That’s fine, I hope it’s enjoying itself at the block party on the other end of town, but I want the transit app to know where it is. It is not fit for purpose.

Comments

[adrian_turtle]

I don’t think they’re inventing buses entirely from whole cloth. They are
probably assuming the bus is running on its usual schedule, and that every bus is exactly on time. I think that was state of the art for train schedules 100 years ago, when they didn’t have AI.