German
Spanish
French
Italian
Portuguese
Japanese
Korean
Russian
ChineseWe Want Our Google Transit!
Added on Monday, April 14th, 2008
Last month, Siel over at the Emerald City blog wrote about the Google Transit Earth Day Challenge first proposed by the folks over at World Changing. The idea of the challenge was to get transit agencies to get their systems onto Google Transit by Earth Day 2008, which is on April 22nd. With 8 days to go and no word from Metro, it’s unlikely that LA will be on Google Transit any time soon, but let’s look at what Google Transit could do for us.
By now everyone is aware of the ubiquitous Google Maps and its fantastically innovative way of providing driving directions, simply input a start and end location and Google calculates the best route with turn by turn directions, time estimates, and of course a corresponding map. It’s likely that Google Maps made the once neccessary Thomas Guide a bit irrelevant since its release. Unfortunately, for those without cars, the directions provided by Google Maps are for the most part useless, and transit users have had to rely on proprietary programs created by the cash-strapped transit agencies to get transit directions. These programs, like our own Metro Advanced Trip Planner, tend to be clunky, unattractive, and often teeter along the fine line of usable and unusable. And when compared to most modern web applications, especially the ones created by Google, the agencies programs just can’t compete.
