Club Benefits
When news broke that Nottingham and Derby councils in England had collaborated on a new transit app for both cities, combining the many (MANY) transit providers in the area and offering real-time tracking and in-app ticket purchasing, residents—especially my navigationally-challenged self—were pretty pleased.
Most transit companies' apps are, to put it politely, absolute steaming garbage. So, trying to navigate between them all to complete one relatively simple journey is maddening at the best of times.
However, given that English councils are notoriously cash-strapped at the moment, there were some raised eyebrows about the cost: A hefty £4 million ($5m) of taxpayer money. Considering Nottingham City Council effectively declared itself bankrupt in 2023 and Derby City Council recently hiked taxes by the maximum allowed, it's fair to wonder where exactly the money for Ride East Midlands, as the app is called, came from.
Article continues belowThe answer, pitchfork-carriers will be pleased to hear, is the government. A £15m ($20m) grant from its Future Transport Zones (FTZ) programme covered the cost as part of a bigger scheme to improve mobility in the Midlands. This does mean the money still came out of the public's pocket, but the government does have a few more pennies to play with than your typical beleaguered city council.
Who's this app for?
In short, this app is for people like me: people who a) live in the cities of Nottingham or Derby, b) sometimes like going to places in those cities, and c) would prefer not to get hopelessly lost on the way.
Without assistance, I go in the wrong direction almost 100% of the time. Worse, I'm completely, totally certain that this time I've gone the right way. Then I find myself back where I started and my partner laughs at me.
I've gone the wrong way on the London tube, despite doing the same journey every day, and ended up at the wrong end of the line after the last train had left. I've gotten lost making the five-minute journey from my office to the lunch place around the corner. When we moved into our house, I got lost several times in the first week. It's not exactly a large place, but in my defence, the floor plan is absurd.
In short, I am this app's perfect customer: If it helps me get where I'm going without having a little cry, I will use it forever.
Why does Ride exist?
Understandably, people have questioned the need for so much money and council time to be used on yet another travel app. Google Maps launched in 2005, which is apparently 21 years ago (time flies) and fulfils most people's navigational needs for zero dollars (and access your data).
The idea for Ride East Midlands is sound, though. What do a bunch of Californian programmers know about getting around the dodgy end of England's 22nd largest city?
Judging by Google Maps' pronunciation of U.K. place names, absolutely nothing. Plus, there really are a ton of independent companies running the bus, train, tram, e-scooter, e-bike and car rental services here. Nobody wants to deal with all their separate ticket systems, timetables and schedules when they're running late for their mom's goldfish's birthday party.
In addition to the "one app to rule them all" approach, Ride East Midlands offers several tempting features that Maps doesn't:
- Track buses in real time
- Buy tickets for all travel operators without needing apps and accounts
- View the location and battery level of e-bikes and e-scooters
- Find and book rental cars
- Set preferences for operators, types of transport and how far you're willing to walk
These features make Ride more akin to apps like Citymapper, which is excellent but only works well in major cities, or TfL Go, which only works in London. It's kind of nice to feel like Nottingham and Derby are as worthy of a specific app as the big metropoles, even if it does come off a bit like a throw pillow that says "New York. Paris. Jacksonville."
Does it actually work?
I had a bunch of old tech I needed to sell to CeX, a national retailer that is best described as a kind of pawn shop that only sells used games and tech. It's slightly more glamorous than it sounds, and after looking up my nearest branch (Beeston), I asked both Ride and Google Maps to plot me a course.
Setting up
Instantly, I remember why public transport is considered such a hassle around here. To get to Beeston, which is 6.4 miles from my house, I have to go all the way to the city centre (5.1 miles) and then all the way back out (4.6 miles). In other words, I'm travelling 10 miles to go 6 miles. That's one way, and it doesn't account for the inevitable return trip.
In a car, this journey takes around 15 minutes, depending on traffic. On public transport, it will take one hour and one minute according to Google Maps or 57 minutes according to Ride. It seems that $5m might have been better spent improving routes through the city.
Setting up Ride, it asks me to sign in to something called "Trafi.com". I go to the URL and find it's an app to "connect and integrate all the mobility options — from public transport to micro-mobility into a single multi-modal journey planning platform."
If that looks and sounds familiar, it's because it's the same blasted app as Ride. That's plainly obvious if you superimpose the Ride homescreen next to their press image:
Oh. So this isn't a brand new, coded-from-scratch piece of tech — which would go some way to justifying the price tag. It's a white-labelled pre-existing app that they've fed data and branding into. That's much less impressive.
Worse still: According to Trafi's press release, licensing their app for Nottingham and Derby cost £2.6m (about $3.5m) of the £4m ($5m) budget. Oof.
The Nottingham and Derby version is on the Trafi website, but it looks like it was put up in a hurry. The URL ends in "/copy-of-brussels-floya" while the page title is Trafi: Floya app (Brussels). Floya is the version of the app you'd find in the Belgian capital city.
To make matters worse, the quote from Ride's programme manager is less than inspiring:
After grumbling about misleading marketing, I set my travel preferences in Ride. I go for the big three: bus, train and tram. I'll leave the e-scooters to the teenagers and the rental cars to people who can actually drive.
Setting off
Both apps inform me that I need to walk to a bus stop, get a bus to the train station, change over to a tram heading towards Beeston, then walk to CeX.
Ride and Maps agree on the bus I should take, but disagree on what time it'll arrive: Google says 4.13 p.m., Ride says 4.15 p.m., and the supposedly real-time tracker at the bus stop itself says 11 minutes (4.17 p.m.).
In the end, the bus came at 4.16 p.m., so they were all wrong, but I did get to watch it trundling along in real time on the Ride map.
While we wait, I try Ride's key feature: the ability to buy a bus ticket within the app. It immediately redirects me to the NCT bus operator's website, which wants me to make an account. Annoyingly, even though the app directed me to the website, the ticket I bought there did not appear in Ride.
Both of these things have apparently been fixed in the weeks since.
On the bus
Both apps offer a list of the 27 stops between here and the station, and allow you to watch yourself progress through them in real time. However, the Ride app kept randomly losing GPS signal, and often got stuck at a stop for ages before suddenly catching up. Google Maps, using the same phone, had no such issues.
Google also proved superior in that it counted down the stops and time remaining, so when I'd gone 8 stops, it said "Ride 19 stops (16 min)." All while Ride still said "27 stops, 24 min".
Maps also had a nice little nav ribbon that stayed on my notification bar, and a bigger one when I pulled down the notification shade with a journey progress bar. This is part of Android 16's Live Updates feature, and while still in its infancy, it's a very helpful feature to have.
Along the way, I found one of the stops had slightly changed its name, according to the location screen and announcement on the bus itself. Neither Google Maps nor Ride knew this, but Google does provide the official NCT bus stop codes, which Ride doesn't.
Google also knew the bus departed late and gave the new time, which Ride did not. Perhaps those Silicon Valley types know more about Nottingham than I gave them credit for.
Next leg
Having arrived at the (gray and rainy) Nottingham train station, Ride directed me to the tram stop. The route it chose was directly through the station building, which wasn't obvious to me at all, and left me looking for roads that didn't exist.
That said, my partner, who has a normal sense of direction, knew exactly what it meant, so your mileage may vary.
I succeeded in buying a ticket for NET (Nottingham Express Transit, the tram company) from within Ride as promised. Success! It even showed up on the tickets page.
At this point, Ride was telling me the tram would be here at 4.47 p.m., but wouldn't let me watch it on the map. Apparently, there's no real-time data for trams, which is disappointing. Maps said 4.47 p.m. too, but the sign at the tram stop said 5 minutes (4.50 p.m.).
At 4.47 p.m., Ride and Google Maps decided the tram had gone, and started showing me the next one. It arrived at exactly 4.50 p.m., suggesting the real-time tram boards have better data than the apps. Ride East Midlands admits it doesn't currently have tram data, but I assumed that was because there wasn't any. But if the departure boards have that information, why doesn't Ride?
Again, Google Maps knew the tram left late and at what time, Ride didn't. Worse, Ride was telling me several stops before the end of the journey that we'd arrive at 5.03 p.m. when it was already 5.04 p.m. It seems it was religiously adhering to the scheduled times and not accounting for delays. Google suggested we'd arrive at 5.09 p.m. and we got there at 5.10 p.m. Close enough, I guess.
Last leg
Time to walk to CeX, which Google says is 6 minutes and 0.2 miles away, Ride says 5 minutes and 405 meters (0.25 miles). Once again, Ride doesn't count down and still says 5 minutes when we get there, but it does show our progress in real time on the map. As does Google, which automatically updates to show we've arrived.
At the start of the trip, Google predicted we'd arrive at 5.09 p.m., Ride at 5.07 p.m. Our actual time of 5.16 p.m. isn't bad compared to those estimates, but once again, the American Google Maps beats out locally-made (well… locally branded) Ride for accuracy.
Once I'd traded in my tech, I asked Ride the way home, took one look at the giant list of instructions and ordered an Uber.
Since I didn't swipe through all the screens of the entire journey and press "finish," Ride was still running when I opened the app a week later. It was telling me to walk back to Beeston so I could start my journey home. that's definitely not happening.
Would I use Ride again?
I'm basically Ride's key customer. I live in Nottingham, can't navigate to save my life, and can't deal with all the transport apps. However, I'm not sure I'd use it again.
I'll keep it on my phone, and if I feel like Google Maps isn't doing a good enough job or I want to watch my bus in real time, I might open it. But for step-by-step navigation, it wasn't as good as the much more intuitive Google Maps.
I definitely don't want to sign up to all the operators' websites to buy tickets in the future, but you don't actually have to. You can make contactless payments on buses and buy tram tickets at the machines.
Ride just doesn't add enough to make it worth the glitches and information gaps, and as for being worth $5m—especially when it turned out to be developed by someone else—I personally don't believe that it's value for taxpayer money.
Like me trying to navigate, it's neither here nor there.
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