It’s fun to “ooh” and “aah” over Google’s most interesting products and services, but it’s also frustrating to note their limited availability. Street View, for example, doesn’t picture a road within 600 miles of my home. But Google Transit has just added coverage in a handful of areas.
Dallas, Las Vegas, California’s Humboldt County and Thousand Oaks, and the San Francisco Bay Area have been included in the update. They’re all quite some distance from Lexington, Kentucky (the home of Murdok), but, well, whatever. People in those locations should be pleased, anyway.
Chris Harrelson, a Google Transit software engineer, is also happy. “As you may know, Google Transit began its life as a 20 percent project,” he wrote on the Google LatLong Blog. “Now, the fine folks at BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit] have furthered their collaboration with us in BART 1 percent time which is like 20 percent time, only, as our friends at BART explain, ‘it’s one person and 19 percent less time.’”
And if you’re interested in seeing the results of this effort, Harrelson continued, “This data is available for anyone who wants to access it in the Google Transit Feed Specification, a creative commons-licensed data format we’ve developed to help facilitate sharing of data within the transit community.”
That technology (and the fact that the project doesn’t depend on a fleet of camera cars) should help Google Transit continue to spread.
