Frequently Asked Questions
So many questions, so little time...
Why Citymapper?
Because you are lost. Or if you are not now you may be later...
We believe that you should have all (preferably real-time) data about using your city readily available on your smartphone, with the best design possible, personalised to you, so that you focus on experiencing your city rather than trying to survive it.
Why green?
Because green is cool, clean, healthy, natural, fresh etc, the colour you wish the city was. Plus every other app and website is blue. Blue is soo boooring. Did you ever think what would happen if we ran out of blue? The whole internet would fall apart! Did you ever think about that?!
I’m sad because adding new cities must have made Citymapper slower, right?
Nope, having another city shouldn’t noticeably affect the speed or size of the app.
Want us to add your city next? Vote here.
The app is loading really slowly.
You may be having a mobile connectivity problem. Please try loading other websites/apps on your phone to see if those work. Also try force quitting the app and restarting your phone -- for obscure reasons, it often does the trick. If the issue persists, please let us know and include the name of your mobile carrier in your message.
I don’t get any results!
Please ensure that you have a good data connection. Otherwise, the following may be the cause:
- It's possible that your carrier has added us to their content block, in which case try disabling content block on your mobile account to see if that helps.
- You’re searching at a time of day when transit is not running (e.g. late at night). If you change the arrival time, you should see results.
- You’re on the outskirts of a city and are too far away from a station. Please try changing your start/end point to the closest station.
- Your start and end points are too close, so we can’t find any public transit routes. Try using a location further away.
- You might be in an area where we do not support all agencies. If you’d like for an agency to be added to the app, please let us know and we’ll see what we can do.
Real-time/live data is not working perfectly.
Live data is one of the huge advantages of living in an open data city. You should be proud. However, it's pretty new, and there are various issues. We get live data from the transit agencies and do a lot of work in making it fast and reliable. Be happy, your grandma probably had to wait for hours at the bus stop freezing, praying that one day you would have live data.
Does use of GPS eat up a lot of my battery?
We only turn the GPS on when it’s on your screen, and try to be efficient about battery power. The only exception is when you’ve chosen to track a journey where we use “geofencing”. This shows up in your status bar as a hollow arrow, and it uses essentially no battery power, since it’s not using the GPS chip.
My GPS location is inaccurate!
Like any app that uses location services, Citymapper works better if your wifi services are on, even if you are not connected to any network.
OMG I love the new design/changes you guys are awesome.
Thanks.
OMG I hate the new design/changes, I want to die.
Sorry.
I rely on this app. Will you change things in the future?
We pledge to keep the app simple and reliable with consistency in the basic interface. We will always prioritise your ability to get your relevant transport information. Aside from that all bets are off, we will update rapidly, try things, create new experiences, run experiments, do things no one has ever done before, so enjoy the ride.
How do you get routing results?
We use our own routing algorithms for transit and walking. We're reinventing how we believe routing should work in the urban environment and in the era of real-time. We are continuously improving our routing results to make them even better and your feedback through 'report issue' helps us do so.
Train data
Data for trains are the most challenging right now, and often come from a different source. Do confirm information at the station and expect this to get better over time.
Why isn’t my transit agency included in the app?
Citymapper strives to include all transit options in our cities when the agencies have made their data open. If you’d like for an agency to be added to the app, please let us know and we’ll investigate.
I searched for a place and the address/location was wrong / could not be found.
Sorry about that! Please report the details to us so we can investigate.
How do I switch to a different city?
Tap on the text at the top of the home screen that says "Citymapper [city name]”. From there you can switch to a different city.
How can I change the language displayed in the app?
Citymapper uses the language that your phone is set to, so to change the language used in the app, please change your phone’s language.
How can I change the units displayed in the app?
It’s currently not possible to change the units -- they are set per city to match what system most of the inhabitants use.
How do you know all the secret walking paths?
We do our own walk routing using OpenStreetMaps (it's like Wikipedia but for maps), which has all the best routes constantly updated by some good people who know such things.
My teleporter/jetpack isn’t working!
Hey, we said it was in beta!
What’s coming next?
Top secret, hush hush.
Hm, I still haven’t found the answer I was looking for...
thx