Business
Citymapper is shutting down its efforts to reinvent the bus
City navigation and public transit app Citymapper is ending the program it called ‘Citymapper Ride,’ which has gone through a number of incarnations since its introduction back in 2017.
Since then, the company has gone from running bus one route in London designed to supplement a need for customers that wasn’t currently well-addressed by existing transit options, to operating shared cab rides, and the program has been renamed from Smarbus, to Smartride to finally Citymapper Ride.
In a Medium post detailing the decision to end the program, Citymapper noted a number of reasons why it’s shutting down the program and this line of product development. These include a mismatch with its mission in the evolution of the product from bus operation to shared cabs; a desire to focus on Pass, its subscription service that provides access to mobility services including public transit, bicycles and cabs for one fee; a desire to give its partners more emphasis rather than competing with them; economics that don’t make sense without focus specifically on making them work; and regulations that hampered some of its efforts, including operating bus lines.
In the end, Citymapper running buses and acting as a kind of Uber junior was always a bit of a weird distraction from its core mission, and it always felt experimental. The mobility market overall seems to be undergoing a maturation in recent years, so it makes sense for tech companies to be applying the learnings resulting from some of their more ambitious larks.
-
Business7 days ago
Mood.camera is an iOS app that feels like using a retro analog camera
-
Business7 days ago
UnitedHealth says Change hackers stole health data on ‘substantial proportion of people in America’
-
Business5 days ago
Tesla’s new growth plan is centered around mysterious cheaper models
-
Business4 days ago
Xaira, an AI drug discovery startup, launches with a massive $1B, says it’s ‘ready’ to start developing drugs
-
Business5 days ago
UK probes Amazon and Microsoft over AI partnerships with Mistral, Anthropic, and Inflection
-
Entertainment3 days ago
Summer Movie Preview: From ‘Alien’ and ‘Furiosa’ to ‘Deadpool and Wolverine’
-
Business6 days ago
Two widow founders launch DayNew, a social platform for people dealing with grief and trauma
-
Entertainment6 days ago
Tesla’s in trouble. Is Elon Musk the problem?