This Bus App From China is So Good It Makes Me Actually Want To Ride The Bus
I prefer the subway to the bus – there’s more chance of getting a seat, the AC is never broken, and I’m less likely to get elbowed by a granny as I step aboard. Plus, waiting for a bus can feel like being in a Beckett play. “Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.” But one good-looking new app called Pandabus is looking to take some of the guesswork out of riding the bus in China.
The Pandabus app works in both Chinese and English (though the maps and bus stop names are inevitably in Chinese) and uses your phone’s GPS to find your location and show all buses in the area. It also shows how often those buses run, but sadly it lacks real-time bus tracking, so you’ll have a better – if not exact idea – of how long to wait for your ride.
Pandabus – which launched on Android this week after an earlier debut on iOS – makes a lot of use of maps to help you find the nearest bus stop. You can also use the maps in the app to drop a pin at your desired destination and Pandabus will then show you all the possible routes to get to that area. It’s so good I want to actually take the bus to test it out.
Pandabusは今週Android版でローンチした。すでにiOS版ではローンチ済みである。地図を多数使用し最も近いバス停を見つけてくれる。アプリ上の地図を使用して希望目的地にピンを立てることができ、Pandabusではそのエリアに通じる可能ルートをすべて表示してくれる。非常にすばらしいので実際にバスに乗って試してみたい。
iOS向けで先行デビューした後に今週アンドロイド向けに配布開始されたPandabus は近隣のバス停を探すのを手助けするのに多くの地図を利用する。アプリ上の地図の望む目的地にピンを差せばPandabus はその地域に至る可能な全てのルートを表示する。それは実際にそれを試すためにバスに乗りたくなるほどとても素晴らしい。
As rival Chinese startup 8684 has shown, there’s a lot of money in public transport apps in the country – well, so long as you have some grand plan to monetize them eventually. Pandabus has nothing so far (not even any ads), so hopefully there’s a business model in there somewhere to build more of these good-looking and useful apps.
The Pandabus app is free for iOS and for Android (or grab the Android ‘.apk’ file from here).
