There's been a lot of buzz about Google Transit and Google walking directions in recent months. Google Transit is a feature of Google Maps that allows you to get public transportation options when you ask for trip directions, just as you've been able to get driving directions for years. Of course, the transit system data has to be in the system, and so transit directions aren't available everywhere. That data is being added, city by city. Some of the earliest adopters were small cities with relatively simple transit systems. Yesterday, New York City announced the launch of Google Transit for the busiest transit system in the U.S. Efforts are underway here in the D.C. area to get this up and running. It's a complicated task involving many transportation agencies in many jurisdictions, so best of luck to everyone working on that.
Google walking directions have been discussed in this blog. It's the same sort of thing, providing directions for getting somewhere on foot. This goes hand-in-hand with Google Transit, because you usually need to do some walking at the beginning and end of transit trips. When you ask for directions, whatever mode you choose, Google maps generates a map of your route. I saw an early, draft version of Google Transit for this area, and the walking parts were displayed as superman-like leaps, because the walking information wasn't in there yet.
A limitation of Google Transit is that it operates within the trip planner, or "Get Directions" function of Google Maps. It only provides transit information between two specific points. You can't make it show you a transit system map, or a particular bus or rail line. So the transit aspect of the mapping system is much more limited than the driving aspect. If you're planning a driving trip, or just looking at a map, the entire road system is visible. If you're planning a transit trip, you only see the part of the transit system that's part of the trip. If you're just looking at a map, transit routes are invisible.
But I recently noticed that they're not completely invisible. Rail stations and even bus stops are now showing up on Google Maps. They're part of the base map -- you don't have to do anything special to see them (except zoom in pretty close). In the D.C. area, Metrorail and Amtrak stations are on there. They're clickable, but there's not much information. The Amtrak icons provide the name of the station and a link to Amtrak. The Metrorail icons provide the name of the station, the Metro lines serving the station, and a link to WMATA.
But here's the good part. Yesterday I noticed icons for MTA commuter buses on a D.C. map I was looking at. Clicking those icons showed the stop name/location, the bus lines serving the stop, and the next scheduled arrival times for buses at that stop. Wow. That's pretty good. I looked into it further, and found out that MTA (Maryland Transit Administration) has data for their system in Google Transit. MTA operates MARC commuter rail and Baltimore's local bus and light rail systems. And now stops for all of those systems are showing up on Google Maps, all with the next scheduled arrival times. If you look in the area served by the local bus system (Baltimore) you can see every single bus stop, with the bus lines serving the stop and next arrival times. And all of this information is available to anyone looking at Google Maps -- it's not a special transit view.
I'm pretty sure that all of this data must be coming from Google Transit. If that's the case, then when D.C. area transit systems are ready to launch on Google Transit, we may start seeing similar information on Google Maps. I'll try to find out. If anyone has more information, please comment.
Joe Chapline is web manager for Arlington County Commuter Services
I'm preparing to move (back) to the SF Bay Area from Baltimore, and was checking out the bike distances to various potential houses from my office. I noticed that one of the "user added" features for the Oakland area includes the BART (metro) system stations and routes. I don't know how hard it would be to make a similar overlay, but that might be one way to get through until Transit comes fully online.
Posted by: Joel | September 25, 2008 at 09:45 AM