Google Transit: Trip Planning Worldwide

Google Transit debuts in beta, to eventually offer trip planning for cities around the globe.

TriMet, the public transit agency serving the greater Portland, Oregon, USA area, has been selected as the sole partner with Google in the beta test rollout of a new transit trip-planning, it was announced on Wednesday 7 Dec 2005.

The new service, dubbed Google Transit (http://www.google.com/transit), offers a glimpse of what transit trip planning can become in the near future. Its aim appears to be a place where anyone with a Web browser can come to and find out what moves they’ll have to make to get there from here in any one city to any other city. The advantage here is obvious: transit travelers can expect to save the time and effort expended in searches for transit system portals in numerous cities by going to Google’s one-stop shop for the rider info they need.

The service combines the Google Maps API with the transit system’s scheduling information to produce a map graphical display as well as a textual list of directions indicating how far to walk, which routes to take, when to transfer and when to board/deboard.

At the moment, the beta test is limited to TriMet but as the bugs are worked out it is expected that Google will add more cities at that notional date. The decision to partner with TriMet is yet another feather in the cap of a transit authority with a generally positive reputation in the USA and abroad.