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Moovit, TomTom and Microsoft introduce comprehensive multi-modal trip planner

Posted: 13 February 2019 | | No comments yet

This new trip planner offers real-time drive, park and transport information within one package, which no other urban mobility solution currently does.

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Moovit and TomTom have aligned with Microsoft to launch the first comprehensive multi-modal trip planner, a solution to reduce congestion in cities and enable developers to build better travel apps.

Executives from all three companies demonstrated the solution at the MOVE conference at ExCel London, identifying the available driving, parking and public transport options, and surfacing them in a single package for map users.

The solution is powered by Moovit’s Transit APIs with driving and parking information using TomTom’s APIs, and shows all the options for driving a car from a suburb to a parking lot near a transit station, riding public transport into the city and completing the journey on transit, on foot, via car-sharing or on a scooter or bike. Through integration with Azure Maps, Microsoft’s location intelligence platform for the Azure cloud, developers will be able to integrate multi-modal trip planning to their IoT, mobility, smart city and logistics solutions.

“Over the last few years cities have experienced rising urban sprawl, where residents of metropolitan areas have been pushed out towards suburban areas, often beyond the limits of public transit lines,” Chris Pendleton, Head of Azure Maps, said. “With most jobs still residing in densely populated cities, the typical commute is becoming multimodal: requiring the suburbanite to first drive to a public transit stop and continue their commute on a train, bus, scooter or bike. The number of decisions that fall on the commuter to make are also greater than ever before – from choosing between transit options to estimating parking availability – and this solution lifts that burden from them by tackling complete first-mile and last-mile optimisation.”

“Moovit’s mission is to simplify urban mobility all around the world and we have long provided the best way for consumers to get transit directions and other urban mobility options,” Moovit co-Founder and CEO, Nir Erez, said. “In November 2018 we partnered with Microsoft to integrate our transit APIs to Azure to help developers build richer apps for billions of commuters. I couldn’t be more pleased that our relationship with Microsoft has evolved to the point where we’re adding more of our transit APIs, combined with TomTom’s Routing API and Traffic API, to create full multi-modal mapping capabilities for developers on Azure Maps with precise ETAs. This will lead to commuters having the best option to plan a trip combining legs on public transit, ride-sharing, bike or scooter.”

Every day, Moovit manages more than 5 million trip plan requests and generates more than 40 million itinerary options for over 350 million users in more than 2,700 cities in 88 countries. The company’s multi-modal trip plan engine is based on static, statistical and real-time public transport data, as well as real-time shared bike, scooter and car-sharing data.

“Location data has become more relevant and important than ever before and no one knows this better than TomTom. We have revolutionised the way that maps are updated by inventing a unique map-making platform, able to deliver a continuously up-to-date map,” TomTom Managing Director, Anders Truelsen, said. “Our location technologies power individuals, businesses and cities to be more sustainable and get to places efficiently and safely.”

In January 2019, Yovav Meydad, Moovit’s Chief Marketing and Growth Officer, spoke to Intelligent Transport about how a community-driven approach to transport information collection led to the world’s largest transport data repository, and how meeting the demand for reliable transport data has become key in developing MaaS solutions. Click here to read more.