Some of the world’s top urban mobility leaders today unveiled the world’s first comprehensive multi-modal trip planner, a solution to reduce congestion in cities around the world that will enable developers to build richer apps for consumers to get around their cities. Executives from Moovit, a leading Mobility as a Service (MaaS) provider and the world’s #1 transit app, TomTom, the location technology specialist, and Microsoft’s Azure Maps demonstrated the solution that identifies all of the driving, parking, and public transit options, and surfaces them in a single package for map users. This will be particularly useful for suburbanites who don’t know where to park their car or which transit line to take in lieu of driving into the city.
Flanked by Moovit Co-founder and CEO Nir Erez and TomTom Managing Director Anders Truelsen, Chris Pendleton, Head of Azure Maps unveiled the solution during his keynote at the MOVE conference at ExCel London. The solution, which is powered by Moovit’s Transit APIs with driving and parking information using TomTom’s APIs, shows the options for driving a car from a suburb to a parking lot near a transit station, riding transit into the city and completing the journey on transit, on foot, via car-sharing or on a scooter or bike. No other urban mobility solution offers real-time drive, park, and transit information within one trip plan. Through integration with Azure Maps, Microsoft’s location intelligence platform for the Azure cloud, developers will be able to integrate multi-modal trip planning to their IoT, mobility, smart city and logistics solutions.
The new APIs are in addition to the transit API integration Microsoft and Moovit announced last November.
“Over the last few years cities have experienced rising urban sprawl, where residents of metropolitan areas have been pushed out towards suburban areas, often beyond the limits of public transit lines,” Pendleton said. “With most jobs still residing in densely populated cities, the typical commute is becoming multimodal: requiring the suburbanite to first drive to a public transit stop and continue their commute on a train, bus, scooter or bike. The number of decisions that fall on the commuter to make are also greater than ever before – from choosing between transit options to estimating parking availability- and this solution lifts that burden from them by tackling complete first-mile and last-mile routing.”
“Moovit’s mission is to simplify urban mobility all around the world and we have long provided the best way for consumers to get transit directions and other urban mobility options,” Erez said. “Last November we partnered with Microsoft to integrate our transit APIs to Azure to help developers build richer apps for billions of commuters. I couldn’t be more pleased that our relationship with Microsoft has evolved to the point where we’re adding more of our transit APIs, combined with TomTom’s Routing API and Traffic API, to create full multi-modal mapping capabilities for developers on Azure Maps with precise ETAs. This will lead to commuters having the best option to plan a trip combining legs on public transit, ride-sharing, bike or scooter, and other legs by car, including finding available parking lot spaces in real-time.”
Moovit’s leadership in multi-modal trip planning stems from more than six years of optimizing journeys for urban riders using the services of more than 7,000 transit agencies worldwide. Every day, Moovit manages more than five million trip plan requests and generates more than 40 million itinerary options for its more than 350 million users in more than 2,700 cities in 88 countries. The company’s multi-modal trip plan engine is based on static, statistical, and real-time public transit data, as well as real-time shared bike, scooter and car-sharing data.
“Location data has become more relevant and important than ever before and no one knows this better than TomTom. We have revolutionized the way that maps are updated by inventing a unique mapmaking platform, able to deliver a continuously up-to-date map,” Truelsen said. “Our location technologies power individuals, businesses and cities to be more sustainable and get to places efficiently and safely – creating a better world”
“Blending TomTom’s location and parking data with Moovit’s multi-modal trip planning gives Azure Maps an unprecedented view of every facet of urban mobility,” Pendleton added. “No one else has provided this comprehensive level of service in one solution.”
Looks like Moovit, TomTom, and Microsoft’s Azure Maps combined their effortas for a good reason. I hope trip planning will become much easier for a lot of people, thanks for the heads up.