A visit to Duitama, Colombia, gave Trufi president Christoph Hanser the chance to use a Trufi app for the first time in an unfamiliar city — as a stranger in town.
Christoph is in Colombia spending a sabbatical away from Hamburg, Germany. Duitama is home to the BusBoy app, which is based on Trufi code. Importantly, Duitama is also home to our student OpenStreetMappers known as the “Duitama Mapping Stars,” as well as our business development manager, Leonardo Gutiérrez.
VIP Treatment
Christoph’s reception in Duitama was celebratory. He met several of the Mapping Stars, and Sergio Andrés Peña, Principal of Salesiano College, where Leonardo teaches mapping. They welcomed “the president of Trufi” into their classroom, and were proud to show off their work and their commitment to enabling sustainable mobility in the department of Boyacá.
When it came time to leave Duitama, Christoph turned down a ride to the bus terminal. Instead, he pulled out his phone and used BusBoy to guide him.
First-Time User Experience
This was the first time Christoph had used a Trufi app in a city he didn’t already know well. In Cochabamba, Bolivia, where the original Trufi app was born, he had been living for some time before the app was started. In Hamburg, as a native and cycling advocate, he initiated our bike app Nicht ohne mein Rad (Not Without My Bike).
Duitama was different: With no mental map of the city, he relied entirely on the app — and helpful locals.
Christoph found the app to be almost right, but not quite. “Points of interest were missing,” Christoph said, “and only bus 5A goes to the central station. But at least it showed me bus 5 and 1, which was exactly what I could use from the crossing where I started.” A food vendor confirmed what the app suggested: “You can take 5A and 1.” The ride worked perfectly. “It was like typical Trufi experience.”
With BusBoy and helpful strangers, Christoph made it to the terminal using city buses: busetas. From there, he would continue on to Tunja and Sáchica on the inter-city buses: flotas.
Flotas Interruptus — Mobility in the Countryside
Christoph’s trip highlighted challenges that extend beyond the current scope of BusBoy, which currently only serves the cities of Duitama and Sogamoso in the Boyacá department.
Waiting for the 3-hour inter-city bus in Sáchica, he joined a small group of travelers who had already been standing by for 15 or 30 minutes, unsure whether a bus would arrive at all. They all had smartphones, but no app to help them with inter-city flotas.
Some used their phones to call known drivers directly. A woman approached a taxi driver to ask if he could take them to the next town.
“The taxi was too expensive, and there was no other bus,” Christoph recalled. “We didn’t know where the bus was or if it would come at all. In the countryside you really depend on the bus, because unlike in the city, you don’t have other options.”
This anxiety is a mobility reality for millions of people in the global South. It underscores why access to reliable, safe, and equitable mobility is more than convenience: it is a foundation of social equity and development.
Eventually the bus arrived.
Trufi’s Work Can’t Stop at City Limits
First-hand experiences like these are why Trufi doesn’t just build apps from existing datasets. In many cities, those datasets don’t exist. Routes, schedules, and stops need to be mapped — often for the very first time — so that communities can gain access to trustworthy information.
Our presence in Duitama is part of that process: digitizing informal transport networks, and making the networks visible to apps, planners, researchers, and innovators.
Christoph’s trip reinforced that the work cannot stop at city limits. Rural areas and small towns are just as dependent on public transport, often more so. Future development of BusBoy and other Trufi tools must include flotas — the inter-city buses — alongside city busetas. GPS tracking, real-time location data, and community-informed mapping are the way forward.
Public transport should be attractive, affordable, safe, and sustainable for everyone, whether in Hamburg, Cochabamba, Duitama, or the pueblos of Boyacá. Apps such as BusBoy show what is possible — but real-world tests as travelers remind us how much work is still to be done.
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