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How Google Is Remapping Public Transportation
waderoush writes "Google wants to 'organize the world's information,' but there isn't a marketplace or a category of knowledge it can organize without remaking it in the process. A case in point: public transportation. Largely outside the media spotlight, Google has wrought a quiet revolution over the last five years in the way commuters get schedule information for local buses and trains, and the way public transit agencies communicate with their riders. GTFS and GTFS-realtime, which Google invented, have become the de facto world standards for sharing transit data, and have opened up space for a whole ecosystem of third-party transit app developers. This in-depth article looks at the history of GTFS and Google's efforts to give people information (largely via their smartphones) that can help them plan their commutes on public transportation — and, not incidentally, drive a lot less."
After missing three or four timed-transfer connections, I've given up on Google Maps for transit.
I'm sure it works sometimes, but since they've made it impossible to check their work (they don't give you access to the schedule data) it's a hell of a lot easier just to check the schedule myself.
That said it does work okay for short bus trips, but I've already got an app on my phone that tells me when the bus is arriving base on real-time data. No need to bring Google Maps into the picture.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I'm a dispatcher with a small transit agency out in the Midwest on Google Transit, and I have to say its been great for us and our riders. New passengers are typically unfamiliar with locations around towns or unfamiliar with the local bus schedule, and giving them a trip planner that is already built into a familiar interface on Google sure makes life easier on them. The GTFS feed itself is also useful for external developers of programs that provide extra service to passengers, like Android or iPhone applications, or even members of the public that just want a well-documented view of exactly how the buses in a town operate. The fact that all of this is free is just icing on the cake.
A shout out to Bob Heitzman for his wonderful Excel-based tools (https://sites.google.com/site/rheitzman/) that enabled our system and others to get on to Google in the first place. Anyone out there who works for a small public transit system should check those out if you're wondering about supporting a GTFS feed. They aren't fancy, but they work well for outfits that don't have the manpower to run a full set of scheduling software.
GTFS? Get The Fucking Subway?
Somebody please tell this to the Japanese. While their bus service is decent enough, getting information about routes and timetables here is virtually impossible. All the Japanese bus company websites are still Web 0.8, there are many many private bus companies even within the same city and there's no one service that aggregates all the information.
Google Bus would be a great service here. They have already done it for trains, which works really well.
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
Google Transit is not news to those of us who work in transportation. I work in Sustainable Transportation/Transportation Demand Management and my job is to get people to do (practically) anything but drive a car alone. Since I also work at a University, it's also my job to convince students not to bring cars to school (at least for the first few years) and it would be SO MUCH EASIER if I could convince Google to jump into multi-modal trip planning. Why?
Well, let's assume you're at my University and want to get somewhere 85 miles south without a car. You might be able to bus to the local train station, catch a southbound train, and then catch another bus to your final destination. However, the bus service here is contracting (sharply) due to budget constraints so a bus connection to a train will not always be an option.
I often suggest biking to the train, riding the train, and then biking to the final destination, but since Google Maps treats transit (bus/train) and biking separately, my suggestion can only go so far. It requires some rather involved planning for a novice to get from our campus to the train station by bike.
There are other options like OpenTripPlanner which, when coupled with a well-mapped OpenStreetMaps, can be an incredible way to plan multi-modal trips in addition to mapping out literally everything in an area from streets to bike lanes to sidewalks, stairs, and handicap accessible ramps... but it takes A LOT of work to perfect a local map and then to host an OpenTripPlanner server. It's relatively easy, but it's man-hour intense.
So, come on Google, pretty please.
“The biggest thing holding us back in the U.S. is land use patterns,” says Brian Ferris, a Google Transit engineer based in Zurich, Switzerland. “European cities are more compact, so public transportation dollars go a lot farther. In the U.S., huge parts of our cities were built after the automobile came to prominence. But we can’t change American cities tomorrow.
California doesn't want to change in order to be like Switzerland. What makes him think that we would? We don't see Southern California as a problem that needs to be fixed. We see it as an improvement over compacted cities.
You must not be driving the freeways here.
California doesn't want to change in order to be like Switzerland. What makes him think that we would? We don't see Southern California as a problem that needs to be fixed. We see it as an improvement over compacted cities.
The issue is that the United States was founded on the principal of expanding outward and populating as much territory as possible. This philosophy has proven to result in some huge drawbacks with outward expansion still financially incentivized as opposed to a focus on maintaining and supporting infrastructure. This has caused an extreme disparity in land use per person in relation to most european cities. As a result we see begin to see the core of many cities become dilapidated and unmaintained as well as a huge influx of systems to support the personal transit means of each individual that has become all but a necessity. Disregarding the impact of that many more vehicles on the roads, it becomes a lot easier for social segregations to be reinforced with no foreseeable future of remedying the gap.
I for one would like to see this discouraged as much as possible and would more than welcome alternatives to everyone securing their own means of personal transportation. I know I've digressed a bit from the topic of the article but I would say that google's attempts to make public transit more transparent and viable to someone who may have overlooked the option is a step in the right direction; even if they haven't hit the nail on the head.
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It should be noted that Brian Ferris is from the United States. He got hired by Google to do transit work as a result of his thesis doing similar work for the Seattle area public transit (see OneBusAway if you are in the Seattle area and haven't heard of it). He's not some random European complaining about the United States.
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NextBus has been providing real-time bus data for years, and doing it better than Google. NextBus did all the hard work to make this work - they developed the position-reporting boxes that go on buses over a decade ago, got transit systems to adopt their technology, and developed a prediction system that figures out when the next bus will show up, based on live data and history. They even put signs in bus shelters that tell when the next bus will arrive.
There was substantial opposition in the transit industry at first. Some transit agencies didn't want accurate data on their operation publicly available. Some of them still don't. But the ones that do find it useful. The transit agency gets all the bus data and can evaluate how their operation is working.
Then some clown writes an article as if Google invented the technology. This is more like the old MIcrosoft tactic of "embrace, extend, devour".
I've tried Google's public transport option a few times, but it's given bad plans. I don't know if they don't have good enough data, or if their algorithms aren't tuned to working in a city with so many frequent services as London, but the official route planner is much better -- and covers everything in London, which is enough for most people in London. Google's is very keen to switch from the Underground to buses -- it forgets that it takes much longer to get from the deep-underground platforms of the London Underground, crammed with people, out onto the street (which exit?), to the bus stop (which side of the road? which stop?) than to walk to a different platform for a different line. It's also optimistic with journey times during rush hour -- buses are often slowed by traffic/people, trains aren't much affected.
Also, when service frequency varies, it's most useful to know "take bus 23, buses are every 10 minutes" than "take bus 23 at 08:23". I've been approached by tourists concerned that there was no London Underground train at 20:42. Well, no, but there was one at 20:40, and another at 20:43.
Many European cities, and many elsewhere, have a single website with a routeplanner for that city. I expect many, many people still use these websites rather than Google.
The problem... well stated. The fundamental maths of current public transport technologies mean that they can physically never replace the car in terms of performance. You could spend trillions on it and it would still suck so badly that nobody uses it. (This is what Europe does)
Come take the subway in Paris and you will find it so packed you will wish nobody used it. Take a car instead and an hour and a handful of miles later you will wish you had taken the subway instead.
So no. There are public transportation systems that are both widely used and competitive with cars.