The second concept is the bus talks to the user. This means they can talk to each other - and tell other buses to slow down or speed up depending on the current demand. Smartbuses on a route are like an integrated mesh network - aware of each others status and proximity and able to self-predict their ETAs and passenger demand. The bus provides data of it’s whereabouts and behaviours, traffic and timings, passenger numbers and payments - in real time - to both the controller (i.e us) and to - and this is key - other buses. The first is the concept of ‘Bus as a Platform’. Well, three - thought the third really sowed it’s colours later in the game. There are two key Smart innovations in this stack. Sure, the bus was running on a Smart route thanks to SimCity, but we wanted to make the bus smart too. We also wanted to deliver a Smart element to the buses. Buses are not really cutting edge tech - they’re cumbersome, heavy duty and - well - not a Tesla. Neither is placing a server on a bus to facilitate that API. This means that even calculating a basic business model is complex as everything is in constant flux and renegotiation.īuilding a Bus API isn’t easy. We wanted to investigate transit products, but we didn’t even know if there was even an opportunity - mass transit dynamics are complex, subsidised and buried in policy. The idea was born of a hack in the FE team to figure out how to overlay some of our live app and open source data and make sense of it. SimCity started life as a MapBox map with some simple data overlays. So while this serves as a nice portfolio piece, sure, it’s also a static reminder for me about what I did for the entirety of 2017 and why I should be constantly in awe at what we achieved - especially over the first 4 months. But I wanted to give an overview of the project / product in one space because it’s such a vast project / product - and one I keep forgetting the sheer complexity of. I’ve written and talked quite a bit about Citymapper’s Smartbus project and my role in it - including all the ‘official’ writing I did about it on the company Medium blog and in the press.

Simcity 4 mapper