Ride, the new travel app for Nottingham and Derby, launched in December and is being used by hundreds of people every day. Here, Jorgen Pedersen, the project’s technical lead, provides his latest update…

Ride is going from strength to strength. A little over two months since launch and we have now surpassed 10,000 downloads, with some brilliant reviews – many thanks for taking the time to provide your comments, critique and feedback.

While Ride is far from perfect, we are proud of it. I’m not sure whether you saw the recent BBC report on Ride versus Google, but Ride provided a great account of itself – demonstrating that it does provide tangible benefits over the Google platform.

In this head-to-head competition covering the same Derby-to-Nottingham journey, we beat Google Maps (which has had around $1bn spent on it). How amazing is that? It was quite the David/Goliath contest.

Many of you will be aware that developing and delivering successful mobile apps of any description is a numbers game. It’s all about the number of users being aware of the app, using the app, providing feedback, and helping us to identify what you (our customers) need, want and desire to be included.

So, if you haven’t already, please spread the Ride word to your friends, family, colleagues, aunties, uncles, brothers, sisters and anyone else you can think of. It will truly help us collectively to be more successful.

Since our last blog two weeks ago, we have:

• Added Littles Travel data for both journey planning and real-time – will be available in the Ride app next week
• Continued the development of Nottingham City Transport (NCT) integrated ticketing
• Signed off the specification for incorporating park-and-ride features into the app. This will be the first step to providing integrated car and/or bike and public transport integration, which in turn should be a catalyst to instigate behavioural change
• Signed off the specification for, and started the delivery of, integrated ticketing which will provide a really simple way of being able to choose tickets based on your chosen itinerary. But please be patient for this – it’s a complex activity which is unlikely to be available until later in the year
• We are actively exploring how we might be able to link up with Nottingham Green Rewards, to see how we could potentially ‘gamify’ good healthy, active and green practices, while Ride users also get a chance to win real prizes. This is very early days, but demonstrates our commitment to trying to make Ride more interactive and tailored to the needs of our customers
• We have signed off the specification for social travel speeds (how quickly an individual user walks and rides bikes or scooters), which will see some elements of personalisation being introduced to Ride
• We are also acutely aware that at present there are few features for accessibility planning. We have started the design work for this and have agreed to meet with accessibility stakeholders to help us identify what can and should be included. Please watch this space we will endeavour to provide regular updates

Lastly, I just wanted to say thanks for your support – together we are building something great.

Ride can be downloaded free from your app store, or through the website here