The British obsession with iPhone transport apps

Giles Turnbull ()

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If there’s one thing the British like complaining about more than the weather, it’s the transport system.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise to find the App Store bulging with apps for people on the move. Here are just a handful of my favourites…

There’s Alistair Stuart’s Trains, giving near-as-dammit live information from UK station departure boards: essential for people five minutes walk away from the station door, and whose train ought to be leaving in four minutes.

And there’s Ian Smith’s LondonCam, a highly rated app that displays the latest image from any of more than 80 traffic cams that monitor London’s busiest roads and interchanges.

Traffic UK provides real-time traffic updates for the area around your current location, or for any place you care to name.

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And TubeStatus is one of several London Underground monitoring apps, providing timely warnings of line closures and service disruptions. Which, as any Londoner will tell you, are many and varied and frustratingly frequent.

3 comments »

About the author

gilest

Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. He has a website you can ignore and a Twitter account you needn't follow.

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Posted in iPhone, Software |

  • Tom

    I think it fair to say we wouldn’t need these apps as much if our transport ran on time a bit more! Having access to the timetable of transport is very useful. These kind of apps can help you save valuable time not being stuck whilst commuting, or missing out on a connection. Come on TFL, National Rail, First etc – lets see some work on this! – GPS tag the buses etc and give us the information via a googlemap mashup etc.

  • imajoebob

    Holy Mackeral!! An iPhone App that’s truly useful?? I didn’t know that was possible.

    Unless and until National rail and TFL update and integrate their tracks, communication, and most of all SIGNALS(!), these Apps aren’t just convenient, they’re indispensable. At least once a month I would get get tossed of a train 2 stops early, or routed (unannounced) to a different station because of signal problems or a broken-down train blocking the tracks.

    I hope they charge a higher price than most, because they deserve to get rich for this. Heck, these are so great I may buy them. And I don’t have an iPhone and I live in the States!

  • http://www.dadams.co.uk Darren

    It’s because our public transport is expensive, unreliable, crowded and poorly-run. Our roads are clogged up. Anything that can be done to improve the experience is bound to please people.