I work for a company that builds trip planner websites. The effort involved to get raw transit data to appear on a website page in an understandable, step-by-step travel plan format can be considerable, and it depends on: who owns the data, who is responsible for maintaining it, how many sources of data need to be imported/formatted/merged and how often this data is updated.
Whether or not a city or region will be able to get transit travel plans from Google Transit will largely depend on who wants to spend the effort to do this data management, to get their transit data in a format that the Google Transit service can use.
Google already has the wherewithal to draw nice looking maps and they have an algorithm to create travel plans (for driving and walking), so the stretch to create travel plans using bus routes is not that great, and right there they've nailed down the 2 toughest aspects of building a trip planner website.
However, it's all about the transit data that Google needs in order for the transit travel plans to work, and not all transit companies have their bus route information encoded in the same way.
I've seen some transit agencies store their bus route data in Excel spreadsheet files. Others use sophisticated 3rd party scheduling software to produce their bus routes, and yet others store their data directly in a database. And all this information has to be formatted into some universal format that Google Transit can use.
I can see small to mid-sized cities which are serviced by 1, perhaps 2 transit agencies that would benefit the most with Google Transit, but for the larger metropolitian cities where you may have more transit agencies responsible for transit I think it would be much, much tougher, with that many more involved parties.
Having said that though, I would love to see Google Transit for New York, or the Bay Area though...
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I work for a company that builds trip planner websites. The effort involved to get raw transit data to appear on a website page in an understandable, step-by-step travel plan format can be considerable, and it depends on: who owns the data, who is responsible for maintaining it, how many sources of data need to be imported/formatted/merged and how often this data is updated.
Whether or not a city or region will be able to get transit travel plans from Google Transit will largely depend on who wants to spend the effort to do this data management, to get their transit data in a format that the Google Transit service can use.
Google already has the wherewithal to draw nice looking maps and they have an algorithm to create travel plans (for driving and walking), so the stretch to create travel plans using bus routes is not that great, and right there they've nailed down the 2 toughest aspects of building a trip planner website.
However, it's all about the transit data that Google needs in order for the transit travel plans to work, and not all transit companies have their bus route information encoded in the same way.
I've seen some transit agencies store their bus route data in Excel spreadsheet files. Others use sophisticated 3rd party scheduling software to produce their bus routes, and yet others store their data directly in a database. And all this information has to be formatted into some universal format that Google Transit can use.
I can see small to mid-sized cities which are serviced by 1, perhaps 2 transit agencies that would benefit the most with Google Transit, but for the larger metropolitian cities where you may have more transit agencies responsible for transit I think it would be much, much tougher, with that many more involved parties.
Having said that though, I would love to see Google Transit for New York, or the Bay Area though...