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Could iPhone apps change the way we travel?
"Transportation is civilization," Rudyard Kipling once wrote. Today we're more inclined to express this equation with words like mobility and accessibility, but the spirit's the same: The flow of people and goods ("traffic and all that it implies," per Kipling) makes the world hum. But transit can feel uncivilized: We sit in congestion (wishing for the path less taken); we miss trains; we hunt for good places to park a car or a bike; we get lost.
Enter the iPhone. One of the device's greatest areas of promise is as a transportation tool. Rival smartphones, of course, are equipped with GPS, Internet access, etc., but none corral quite so many of the features that delight transpo geeks (an accelerometer, a compass, etc.) into one device. And rival phones can only envy the iPhone's flourishing app market, which includes some 65,000 options, many at least peripherally related to transportation (that is, if you include parallel parking games and the like).
It's intriguing to imagine how transportation itself could be changed by such apps. Of course, the utility of any of them depends on a number of things, ranging from the robustness of the GPS signal to the transparency and fidelity of available information to the number of users the app boasts. (Not to mention battery power.) So here's a broad and by no means exhaustive look at the most promising—or at least most intriguing—apps to date.
"Transportation is civilization," Rudyard Kipling once wrote. Today we're more inclined to express this equation with words like mobility and accessibility, but the spirit's the same: The flow of people and goods ("traffic and all that it implies," per Kipling) makes the world hum. But transit can feel uncivilized: We sit in congestion (wishing for the path less taken); we miss trains; we hunt for good places to park a car or a bike; we get lost.
Enter the iPhone. One of the device's greatest areas of promise is as a transportation tool. Rival smartphones, of course, are equipped with GPS, Internet access, etc., but none corral quite so many of the features that delight transpo geeks (an accelerometer, a compass, etc.) into one device. And rival phones can only envy the iPhone's flourishing app market, which includes some 65,000 options, many at least peripherally related to transportation (that is, if you include parallel parking games and the like).
It's intriguing to imagine how transportation itself could be changed by such apps. Of course, the utility of any of them depends on a number of things, ranging from the robustness of the GPS signal to the transparency and fidelity of available information to the number of users the app boasts. (Not to mention battery power.) So here's a broad and by no means exhaustive look at the most promising—or at least most intriguing—apps to date.
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