An ex-Seattleite loved the award-winning transportation app Citymapper so much that he left Seattle to move to London to work for the company. Now, the app is launching in Seattle and Miguel Filipe has penned a letter to his former city to promote the one-stop transportation product.
Filipe, a software engineer and infrastructure lead with Citymapper, said he lived in Seattle for “four great years.” In a note to GeekWire, he said Seattle got him interested in transportation because the city was so different from his home city of Lisbon, Portugal.
In his blog post, Filipe writes about a painful trip home from an afternoon meeting in Bellevue, “jammed on the 520 for an hour.” He said he wishes he had Citymapper back then because the app combines numerous transportation options — bus, Uber, light rail, streetcar, Pronto bikes, Car2Go — into one app that calculates trip times.
He also provides examples of how the app would help determine the easiest mode to use to get from Capitol Hill to Queen Anne. A screen shot shows travel times, prices and even potential calories burned for bikers or walkers.
Citymapper crowdsources votes to determine which city to launch in next and Seattle was tops in the US. Baltimore also just came online to join New York City, San Francisco’s Bay Area, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia.
An Apple App of the Year in 2013 and ’14, a review in The New York Times called Citymapper “quite simply, the best travel app to be introduced in New York City,” adding that it “steamrollers” the competition from similar apps and services provided by Apple and Google Maps.
With an eye clearly on the city he used to call home, Filipe said it’s a “good time to be in Seattle.” He said with “Link all the way to UW, First Hill Streetcar, and now Citymapper … I wish I was there again.”
