…a team of former Google employees has taken on these myriad problems, creating an app called Urban Engines that shows early signs of promise for revolutionizing intra-city movement. The app differs from Google maps in certain significant ways. For one, you can drag and drop location and destination pins, allowing the app to instantaneously draw a smart path from place to place. These feature works without exact addresses, so if you’re traveling across town to merely wander, you don’t need to have a destination in mind. (In our tests, the processing speed was astonishing; we were given a half dozen routes in less time than Google maps produces one.)

Moreover, Urban Engines aggregates city transportation options so that you can know the most efficient route, whether that be by bus, subway, sidewalk – or some combination of all three.