The recent rise of route-planning apps is a bright spot
He blogs about transit and urbanism atI’m an enthusiastic advocate for public transport, in all its forms. But my relationship with the city bus, which is the transit mode most people in the world rely on to get around, has never been good.
I had a similar experience in Saskatoon, where I’d been invited to give a public presentation about ways to improve transit. When I arrived at the airport, I considered joining the taxi queue. But when I checked my phone, I saw that a downtown-bound bus was arriving in a quarter of an hour. That gave me time to wait inside the terminal – sparing me a few minutes of prairie chill – but also to realize that the same app allowed me to purchase and display a single-ride ticket.
But my go-to app – the one that served me so well in Bologna and Saskatoon, and that I rely on at home – is the Transit App, whose simple and robust interface quickly answers the question closest to the heart of many long-suffering transit users: When the heck is the next streetcar, train or bus going to arrive?
“I thought it was great,” Mr. Vermette said, “but with geolocation I knew it could be so much better.” Transit now serves 300 cities, mostly in Canada and the United States, but with a significant presence in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and such populous Latin American metropolises as Buenos Aires and Mexico City. It’s been so successful that many cities have quietly retired their own trip-planning apps and let Transit fill the gap. Mr. Vermette and Mr. Campagna put regular users in the tens of millions, with up to one in three transit riders in some major cities relying on the app every day.
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