A Winner, to Get You There
The New York Times
By JONAH BROMWICH
I was a bit disappointed when I saw that Citymapper had won the 2013 Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s App Quest competition when the results came out a couple of weeks back. Judging by its name, I figured it was just another piece of utilitarian software to help people figure out the city. I was hoping that the winner of the competition, held for apps that complement the transit experience, would be imaginative, like the runner-up, Subculture.FM. Not something so brusque, so practical, so obvious as a map.
Boy, was my disappointment misplaced. Citymapper is, quite simply, the best travel app to be introduced in New York City. In its comprehensiveness, in the wealth of information that it places at users’ fingertips, it steamrollers the competition from similar apps, likeHopStop, as well as the services provided by Apple and Google Maps.
When I typed in a request for directions from my office to my apartment, for instance, Citymapper gave me four suggested subway routes, two suggested bus-only routes (in case I was subway averse), the time and calories I might burn if I were to walk or bike, and a time and price estimate for a cab. It also told me the weather at my destination on a neighborhood basis and the amount of time it might take if I were to use a teleporter (0 minutes every time). Most important, all this data is easy to retrieve and absolutely accurate.
That accuracy is somewhat uncanny. Click on the bike option, and there are directions for both a fast route and a quiet route. The quiet route mirrors my (not uncomplicated) usual path home exactly. And if I want to use a Citi Bike, I can switch to a different layer within the same screen, which shows me bike-sharing stations and the number of bikes available at each.
The secret of Citymapper’s success has to do with the way it sources its data. Though the app is unified on the surface, there’s really a storm of information roiling underneath, including data from Apple Maps, Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, the M.T.A., Forecast.io for neighborhood weather forecasts and other sources. You might think that with all this information, the app would be slow to respond, but on the contrary, it is one of the fastest apps on my phone.
New York is the second city where the app has become operational (after London), and as of now, Citymapper is financed entirely by venture capital and has large if streamlined ambitions. “There should be a great transport app in a city that consolidates everything and gets the city right,” said the company’s founder, Azmat Yusuf. “We really want to get New York City right.”
It is not a finished product. There are plans in place to improve it, adding ferry lines, the Roosevelt Island tram and any other means of transportation available to New Yorkers. “We’re going to keep it simple and usable but we’re going to get everything in there,” Mr. Yusuf said.
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