Improved transportation data in Zurich
(Credit: Google Maps)Google Maps' new Street View feature might be getting all the buzz these days (Hello, kitty) but that's not the only thing that's new with the popular online map application. On Monday, Google announced that Google Maps now has improved information about public transportation in many cities worldwide.
Subway stops, in addition to building outlines and car traffic data, first appeared on Google Maps in February. Now, the subway and train stops provide additional information: which lines are serviced by a particular station, a link to the Web site for the corresponding transportation company, as well as upcoming departure data.
But that last feature's still being rolled out: test runs of New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and Montreal yielded only a link back to the public transportation system's main homepage. You can, however, find departure data in several European cities, like Zurich (as Mashable discovered). In addition, you can search for a particular station by typing it into Google Maps, and it'll direct you right there.
Expanded departure data in Zurich
(Credit: Google Maps)
Only limited data available for NYC
(Credit: Google Maps)Google's uber-beta Labs also has been working on Google Transit, a trip-planning application that's currently available for a handful of U.S. cities (sorry, no NYC, Boston, or San Francisco) as well as all of Japan. That is, if you're O.K. with taking trip-planning recommendations from a company that suggests you swim across the Atlantic to get from New York to Paris.
Has anybody found a U.S. city that has departure data available yet? If so, let us know in the comments.
(Credit:
Google Maps)
Google Maps has made things a little spicier for users who are looking up information on cities like New York, London, and San Francisco: outlines to show the footprints of buildings, and subway stops. Public transportation map mashups have been around for a while--take subway stop site Hopstop, which uses Yahoo Maps, for example--but this is the first time that Google has incorporated that data into its standard map search.
It doesn't look like this has spread to mobile platforms yet: I have Google Maps on my Helio Drift phone (oops, I called it a phone), and it does not have any building outlines or subway stops incorporated.
Additionally, as one Boston-based CNET editor pointed out, the same "M" logo for the New York City subway is used to represent Boston's T system and San Francisco's BART. London's Underground and Paris' Metro are marked by their own symbols. I guess that just confirms that New York City totally pwns every other city in the States.
(Via Kottke.org.)
- prev
- 1
- next
