[photo by Wesley Fryer]
Google is making it easier to ditch your car and use local transit with their new Google Transit tool. At the moment, they have transit information for select cities around the world, but I hope they plan to expand it further! They also have the service available to download to your phone, which is handy when you’re out and about. It gives you walking, bus, and rail directions and calculates your total travel time.
The service is built on information provided by each city’s mass-transit system. This sometimes can cause issues if a town has more than one system. Marty Jerome over at Wired talks about directions he searched including a 35-minute walk rather than a quick bus trip on another Bay-area transit system that had not provided maps for Google to incorporate. As Google collects more transit information, this sort of bugginess will hopefully happen less and less.
While it’s still a new service with lots of room to grow, Google Transit definitely helps take the guesswork out of getting around town without a car in a lot of cities. Its travel time calculation seems like it makes transit a much more realistic option. How likely are you to use Google Transit to plan a trip to the store or your commute to work?
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About Becky Striepe
I love Google. They always come out with the best ideas. I just wish I had some more “public transportation” like subways and trains near me to take advantage of. Oh well, my scooter will have to do for now.