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Transit, the future of… transit apps

Technology

Transit, the future of… transit apps

BY   Alexandre Gauquelin   

With bike sharing programs popping all accross cities, how does the user manage its 10 apps on his smartphone? Between public transport, car sharing, scooter sharing and bike sharing, you can have more than 10 apps and services to deal with. Some cities already understand the major priority in aggregating all the systems in one app for a real mutlimodal service, and some like Singapore or Seattle already signed agreement with bike share companies having them to provide all data (anonymised of course) through public APIs.

 

This beeing said, there was not a long way to go for dynamic start-ups to integrate all those services in one unique app.

 

The first one to go public is Transit, launching this service in Seattle and Washington DC, two of the US cities with the most bike share services. Seattle hosts Ofo, Lime Bike and Spin, as DC hosts DC bikeshare, Jump, Lime Bik,e Mobike, Ofo and Spin (whoah). Free2Move, already running for carshare, will introduce bikeshare in the next couple of months in Seattle.

The Transit app allow the user to see all bikes on the map (data beeing updated every minute), to plan his trip precisely, taking into account the bike lanes and gradient thanks to openstreet maps, and also the traffic and “danger for cyclist” data.

At the moment, Transit redirects you to the bikeshare app for renting, but let’s dream about integrating more, and beeing able to unlock bikes from all services with a unique app? Sure Transit is already working on that.

 

And having a 10in1 app, we can wonder the need for bikeshare providers to build their own app. As long as they provide the appropriate APIs, they will be able to focus on developing other services for the final user. A win-win process.

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