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Smart cities might mean you never miss a bus again

At CES 2020 in Las Vegas, HERE Technologies unveiled two new APIs designed to help improve urban mobility by providing commuters with an easier way to plan routes and find the most intelligent way to their destinations.

The HERE Public Transit API, which holds real-time information on departure boards and service interruptions, can help improve the experience of using public transit by finding the most intelligent way to get to a destination based on a range of dynamic events.

For example, if a train is leaving in two minutes but the station is a five-minute walk away, the API is intelligent enough to know that a user may need to take the next connection or use a different means of transportation.

HERE Technologies’ API leverages a rich portfolio of data from public transit authorities, external agencies and the company’s own HERE proprietary map content, to improve the entire door-to-door user experience. It even provides precise pedestrian instructions that account for stairways, sidewalks, crosswalks, bridges, tunnels, elevators and escalators.

Trip planning

The HERE Intermodal Routing API provides users with an innovative and smart routing experience across cities by combining consolidated public transport with other modes of transportation such as private cars, bikes, taxis and other shared urban mobility services.

The API can help users navigate more efficiently between a given pair of locations and it even offers parking information within proximity of transit stops to combat traffic congestion. It can also tell a commuter how long it takes to drive to the station or suggest an efficient transfer to public transport. Since the API uses daily updates of timetable data, it will also tell users when the next train leaves and how long it will take to walk to the office.

CTO and senior vice president of development at HERE Technologies, Giovanni Lanfranchi explained how the firm’s new APIs can help provide a better urban mobility experience for commuters, saying:

“The mission for HERE Technologies is to pave the way towards greater collaboration in order to provide a seamless urban mobility experience, by helping public and private organizations to offer enhanced multimodal services to their customers. We provide an open platform for content providers to offer and publish urban mobility data that can be integrated into applications to optimize the needs of the urban traveler.”

Source: TechRadar