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Welcome to London! You’re in one of the best cities in the world, home to spectacular cultural happenings, unrivalled restaurants, world-leading nightlife and so much more. But you’re not going to get to enjoy all of that if you can’t navigate the city properly. And you can’t do that on your own – thank god navigation apps exist.
Even if you know the route to your destination, or prefer the analogue way of navigating, map apps are useful for letting you know exactly how long it’ll take you to get there. Most Londoners trust Citymapper or Google Maps to get them around efficiently, but they’re not the only options.
Ultimately there’s not one app that’s the absolute best, its down to personal preference, but here’s our breakdown of the pros and cons of each of the main maps apps that help you get around London.
The best maps apps for navigating London
Citymapper
Citymapper is specifically designed for city navigating. You can compare costs and travel times of basically every mode of transport, from Ubers to e-scooters and it lets you filter for routes with step-free access, minimal walking or the cheapest fares. More than that, it tells you the best exit at your arrival station – which I’ve found particularly useful for the larger, more confusing stations like Bank – and it’ll let you know which part of the train you should get on to minimise walking when you alight.
Arrival time aren’t always 100 percent accurate, and I've found that I sometimes have to scroll down a little to find the most efficient route, but it’s certainly reliable.
Google Maps
We all know Google Maps. It provides travel info for driving, public transport, bikes and walking, including live disruptions (though sometimes these can be behind) and fares. There’s the option to put it into street view so you know exactly what you should be seeing as you walk and it’s useful for when you want to make detours along your way – you can just select ‘add stop’ and add has many as you like. There aren’t as many filters as Citymapper, but you can narrow down your options by type of transport or routes with the least amount of transfers.
Both Google Maps and CityMapper let users save their routes so that you can still see where you need to go, should you find yourself in one of London’s many phone signal dead zones.
TfL Go
With this one, you’re getting live London public transport info straight from the horse’s mouth. It’s got a pretty slick, user-friendly interface, offers live status updates of Tubes and buses, and gives you useful station information like the times they are quietest and where to find toilets. It handily lets you manage your payments for the city’s transport. You can use it to purchase an Oyster card, to top it up and to see your journey history but it doesn’t work for concessionary Oyster photocards, like the 16+, 18+ and Apprentice cards.
As of a few months ago, you can also use TfL Go for cycling around the city. Based on reviews, it seems like it prioritises sticking to official cycleways and quieter routes, as opposed to getting you from A to B as quickly as possible.
Transit
Transit is the underdog of the maps app. It does most of what the other guys do, tracking public transport, providing real life data, showing you the fastest trip, etc, etc. To take away some of that stress before you leave somewhere, it also sends you notifications to alert you to when you should get going in order to catch your bus or train.
If you’re planning ahead, you can also check out Time Out’s weekend travel disruption guides. Find the full list of tube and train closures for October 10-12 here.
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