At your service: planned NYC subway changes now in Google Maps

Since first making New York City public transit directions available in Google Maps, we’ve been working to deliver you with the most accurate and useful information about subway, bus, commuter rail, and ferry service across the greater metro area. Starting today, we’ll also be showing planned service alerts for the city’s subways, which serve more than 1 billion riders each year.

Have you ever arrived at a subway platform only to find that the train you intended to take is skipping stops, rerouted on another line, or isn't running at all due to scheduled maintenance? Now when you click on any of the 468 New York City subway stations labeled on Google Maps, you’ll see whether any planned service changes are expected to affect that station at the time. In addition, the relevant alerts will be included in the step-by-step transit directions pointing you wherever you’re going.

Get transit service alerts on your desktop browser

If you’re looking to find the best route to see a concert after work or checking for any expected delays when already running late, this feature works when you’re online via maps.google.com and Google Maps for Mobile on Android. To adjust your travel around the alerts you see, simply choose another suggested route or change your departure time.

Get transit service alerts on Google Maps for Android

We’re regularly adding new cities and features globally and looking forward to continuing our efforts to make travel by public transportation a better experience in more than 400 regions around the world. For everybody who lives in one of New York City’s five boroughs, commutes in and out every day or is visiting for business or vacation, we hope today’s update improves the ease and efficiency of your trips around the city.

Posted by Csaba Garay, Transit Partner Technology Manager, Google Maps

Now see service alerts for the London Underground in Maps

Ahead of a busy summer in London, we are bringing real time service alerts for the London Underground to Google Maps. We’ll let you know of any disruptions on the Underground that are happening at the time you need them most. To see these alerts, click on a station in a timetable or in the public transport directions results.

Last summer we announced live transit updates, providing travelers with up-to-date information when planning their trips. We are excited about adding real time alerts for the 1 billion passengers that use the Underground every year.

In addition to the service alerts in real time, we’ve included planned engineering works for the weekends in our journey planner as well. When planning a trip for the coming weekend, we will show you the relevant subway alerts as part of the directions results. You can plan a trip for the weekend by changing the departure time in the ‘Get directions’ tab. Should there be planned engineering works for your route, you won’t run into any surprises on the day of travel.

As usual, this information is available on maps.google.co.uk for desktop and mobile, but also on Google Maps for Android. So even when you’re on the go, you’ll always be informed of the latest status of the Underground. Just tap on a station to see if there are any alerts active, or get directions to your destination to see if an alert affects your travels.

  

Public transport directions in Britain are available for all national train routes, London Underground, Overground, DLR and bus routes, and many local bus routes.

Whether you call London home or you’re one of the expected 31 million tourists visiting the city this year, we know that the addition of service alerts to Google Maps will make your travels across the city easier, faster and more convenient.

Posted by Thijs van As, Associate Product Manager, Google Transit

Enhanced search in Google Earth 6.2

Lao-tzu once said, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” In Google Earth, that single step is often searching for the name of the place you want to go. The search field is the gateway to all of the amazing places you might visit, and for the recent release of Google Earth 6.2, we worked hard to make it even more powerful and easy to use.

As a result, searching for a location in Google Earth 6.2 is a bit different: we’ve streamlined the look and feel of the search interface, removing tabs and consolidating all the search fields together into one (just like Google Search). We’ve also added features that Google Earth previously didn’t have, like transit directions and search layers. And we’ve made sure that underneath these shiny new features, you still have access to the power and flexibility of KML.

If you live in one of the many metropolitan areas supported by Google Transit, you’ve probably used the transit directions search on Google Maps to plan a trip. Now you can do the same thing in 3D with Google Earth. Select “Get Directions” and enter your endpoints, then choose the train icon at the top of the search results for public route instructions. You can also click on any of the transit stations or stops to fly there. Be sure to turn on 3D buildings - some train stations are really quite pretty! You’ll also notice icons for walking and biking directions, so if you’ve ever wanted to go on a virtual tour of your next cycling excursion, or find out just how steep that hill is before you commit to the journey, now you can.

New transit directions in Google Earth 6.2

Search layers were first introduced in Google Maps a few years ago, and at last, they’ve recently made their way to Google Earth. Search layers enable you to see all the results of your search on the map at once, not just the top ten, making it easy to find clusters of certain types of businesses like fast food restaurants or coffee shops. One of the more entertaining uses of search layers that I’ve found has to do with a road that will be familiar to anyone who’s visited California: El Camino Real. Stretching from Sonoma Valley to San Diego, El Camino is a great place to find shops and restaurants of all kinds - and lots of them! Here’s a search layer for all the pizza places in the San Francisco Bay area; can you spot El Camino?

Search in Google Earth is much more than a pretty face, though. Just beneath the surface lies the powerful KML language, which you can use to take full control of your searches. Right-click on any search listing to save it to My Places or copy it as KML text, or click one of the icons below the search results to save or copy everything all at once. Save your walking directions to My Places and start a tour of the route to get turn-by-turn directions from the comfort of your chair. You can also click on “History” below the search field to see all of your recent searches at once, and selectively hide and show results to get, say, a picture of the top ten hotels and crêpe restaurants in Paris, for optimal crêpe-eating efficiency.

We’ll continue to improve the search experience in Google Earth, so stay tuned, and keep those searches coming!

Posted by Brian Ellis, Software Engineer, Google Earth

Introducing GTFS-realtime to exchange realtime transit updates

(Cross-posted from the Google Code Blog)



In June, we launched Live Transit Updates, a feature that adds realtime public transport information to Google Maps and Google Maps for mobile. This feature is powered by the GTFS-realtime feed format. Today we’re making the specification of this format public on Google Code. GTFS-realtime allows public transport agencies to provide realtime updates about their fleets. If you’re developing a trip planner or similar application, you can process these feeds and keep your users up-to-date with realtime information.



GTFS-realtime is an extension to GTFS, the General Transit Feed Specification, published by Google in 2006. Nowadays, GTFS is a very commonly used feed format that public transport agencies use to (publicly) provide their transport information. As opposed to GTFS feeds, GTFS-realtime feeds contain very dynamic information. This means that they have to be updated frequently and applications that use them have to fetch them frequently as well. This requires a significant infrastructure from the transport agency’s side, but it results in a continuously updated description of the current situation.



The specification currently includes three types of realtime updates: Trip Updates, Service Alerts and Vehicle Position updates. Each type of update has to be provided in a separate feed, and can be used independently.



Trip Updates are a way to present changes in the timetable. When a trip is delayed, canceled, added or re-routed, a Trip Update can be used to provide this information in realtime. Service Alerts can be used to notify passengers about special circumstances in the public transport network. In a Vehicle Position update, an agency provides the current location of an individual vehicle.



To encode realtime updates, Protocol Buffers are used. Protocol Buffer data structures can be processed very efficiently, resulting in low processing times compared to other popular data encapsulation standards. Because Protocol Buffers are compressed, they also use communication bandwidth efficiently. Protocol Buffers are very easy to work with, and there are libraries available for many programming languages.



The specification was designed through a partnership of the initial Live Transit Updates partner agencies, a number of transit developers, and Google. It has been published under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, the same license used for GTFS. You can discuss the specification and propose changes in the discussion group.



MBTA (Boston) and Trimet (Portland) have already made their GTFS-realtime feeds available for use in your applications. BART (SF Bay Area) and MTS (San Diego) have committed to making their feeds available in the future as well. We hope that many more agencies will follow!



Posted by Vladimir Rychev, Software Engineer

Catch the London Underground with Google Maps

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Starting today, you can get public transport directions for London within Google Maps. One of Europe’s largest metropolitan areas, London is a major destination for both business travelers and tourists. More than 1 billion passengers are serviced by Transport for London (TfL) every year across over 18,000 bus stops and over 250 Underground stations.

Let’s say you’re at Trafalgar Square, and you want to visit Madame Tussauds. With a simple directions search, you’ll see all the possible public transport connections. In Maps, click “Get directions” in the left-hand panel, and then the train icon to see public transport directions. Enter your departure location next to A, and your destination next to B. These can be either street addresses or names of popular places, businesses or restaurants. When you’re done, click the “Get directions” button and suggestions for your trip will appear below.

Public transport directions are available on both Google Maps and Google Maps for mobile, so you always have access to a trip planner. When you’re on mobile, Maps even uses your current location to determine the best trip to your destination. Just search for your destination location, select it on the map and choose the “Directions” option. The suggested trips will be based on your location by default, and provide you multiple alternatives whenever possible.

If you’re using an Android-powered device, you can also get public transport directions with Transit Navigation (Beta) in Google Maps. With this new feature, which we launched earlier this month, you’ll get alerts when it’s time to get off the bus or train at your destination or to make a transfer. Transit Navigation is available in all regions where public transport directions are available, including London.


TfL is among the first agencies in a major European city to make its timetable information publicly available through the London Datastore. We’re strong supporters of open data and bringing information out into the open, and believe that making information publicly accessible can be an enormous engine of economic growth and innovation. ITO World has been a great partner in this launch by ensuring TfL’s data was adapted correctly and ready for our use.

Public transport directions are available for all Underground, bus, tram and Docklands Light Railway (DLR) lines, and we’ll include more public transport information as soon as it’s available. Whether you use public transport every day or infrequently, as a commuter, on a business trip or as a tourist, we hope that public transport directions in London make planning your trips more convenient!

Posted by Thijs van As, Associate Product Manager, Transit Directions

Know when your bus is late with live transit updates in Google Maps

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

Often when I’m taking public transit, I arrive at my stop on time only to anxiously check my watch and look down the street for my bus, which is running late once again. Those extra minutes I’m forced to wait seem like an eternity, and the only information I can access on my phone is when the bus was supposed to arrive.

Starting now, Google Maps for mobile and desktop can tell you when your ride is actually going to arrive with new live transit updates. We partnered with transit agencies to integrate live transit data in four U.S. cities and two European cities: Boston, Portland, Ore., San Diego, San Francisco, Madrid and Turin.



When you click on a transit station or plan a transit route with Google Maps and there are delays or alerts related to your trip, you’ll now see “live departure times” (indicated with a special icon) and service alerts.

Live transit departure times after tapping on a station

Live service alerts when receiving transit directions

Live departures and alerts on desktop

We’re working with our public transit partners to help them provide live data to more people in more cities. You can get live transit updates in the latest version of Google Maps for mobile (requires Android 1.6+), as well as Google Maps on all supported desktop and mobile browsers.

Posted by Sasha Gontmakher, Software Engineer

Google Transit goes to Washington

[Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog]

Every day, many thousands of commuters, locals, and tourists ride public transit in Washington, D.C. To help all of these transit riders find their way around the metro area, today we’re making comprehensive information about D.C.’s public transportation available on Google Transit.

In partnership with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), we’re adding all of D.C.’s Metro and bus stations, stops and routes, as well as connections to other transit systems in nearby cities. You can find this information on Google Maps as well as Google Maps for mobile—no matter where you are, you can get to where you’re going. With Google Transit, D.C. metro-area commuters—including those in Baltimore, Montgomery and Jefferson counties—may discover a quicker route to work, while visitors can easily make their way from Reagan National Airport straight to the Smithsonian.

Public transportation is a vital part of city infrastructure and can help alleviate congestion and reduce emissions. But planning your trip on public transit can be challenging, especially when there are multiple transit agencies and you need to use information from multiple sources to figure out the best route. With mapping tools like the transit feature, we’re working to make that easier.

Directions are also available on Google Maps for mobile—so if you’re graduating from GWU and want to meet some friends in Adams Morgan to celebrate, it’s as easy as pulling out your phone. If you’re using an Android device, for example, search for [Adams Morgan] in Google Maps, click on the Places result and select “Directions.” Switch to Transit in the upper-left corner and find out which bus gets you there fastest.

Wherever your journey takes you, whether using public transit, driving, biking or walking, we hope Google Transit directions in D.C. make finding your way a little easier.

Posted by Noam Ben Haim, Product Manager, Google Maps

Helping you find the right route

With directions in Google Maps, we’re working on helping you find the quickest way to get around, and now finding the right route is a bit easier. For areas with transit information in Google Maps, previously you could compare driving and transit directions by selecting the appropriate icon. Now, when you search for driving directions, transit options may appear directly in the results.

This comes in handy as I visit Madrid and want to find my way from the Hotel Miguel Ángel to the Parque de Atracciones de Madrid. When I search for "Hotel Miguel Ángel, Madrid to Parque de Atracciones de Madrid, Madrid" in Google Maps, I now see the following set of suggestions:

You can see a link to public transit options directly in your driving directions, together with the estimated travel time and number of transfers, for areas where we have transit coverage. This link will appear based on whether public transportation seems like a good alternative for your trip. Similarly, if you’re viewing public transit directions, we may add driving (or taking a taxi) as an alternative.

This feature is currently available in New York, San Francisco, Madrid and Zürich, and we plan to roll this out for more cities in the coming weeks.

Posted by Lucien Pech, Software Engineer

Directions, the way you want them

We recently released advanced options for getting public transit directions on Google Maps, helping you customize your route based on your personal preferences.

We work hard to provide the right results to get from A to B, but sometimes riders have their own preferences. For example, you might not mind a longer journey if it means fewer transfers; or you may prefer traveling by bus or train, rather than subway, to have views of your route. You can now specify these preferences and alter your route results by clicking the “Show options” link below your destination:

We hope that this new feature makes it easier for you to find your way! To get started, please visit maps.google.com/transit.

Posted by Noam Ben-Haim, Product Manager

Train station searches, simplified

Let’s say you are about to take a train to visit another city. What do you need to know before setting out? An important piece of information to know is whether the station near your place has a line to take you there and when it will depart. Now you can get this information by just searching for the transit station in Google Maps.

When you search for a station, you can see a list of transit lines that service the station. The lines are colored and grouped by transit type to make it easier to find the line you are looking for.
For railway trains, you can see the departure time directly. And for other type of transit, namely subways, buses and commuter trains, you could click on the line name to get the next departure time of each direction without leaving the current page. So maybe if biking to work this month doesn’t work out for you, you can have an easier time getting the transit info you need to get around town.

Posted by Xinxing Gu, Associate Product Manager

A new look for Google Transit maps

At the beginning of last year, the Google Maps team launched the Transit Layer, showing the layout of public transportation networks on top of the map in over 50 cities worldwide. Since then, we have grown our coverage to nearly 450 cities and added more information to both the base maps and the transit layer.

We've now released a significant redesign of our transit maps that better highlights the information transit riders are most interested in seeing. Before, the transit map was placed on top of the base road map, obscuring some important information in the base map and competing visually with the complexity of the road network. With this redesign, we're changing the entire base map to put more focus on the transit lines, and lower the prominence of roads. We hope you'll agree that the result is a cleaner, less cluttered map that will make it easier for transit riders to get around.

Looking at the London Underground shows the immediate benefits of removing the clutter of the A-road badges, and the simplified map style which lets the transit lines and roads coexist more elegantly:

In the old transit map of New York, streets such as 8th and 7th Avenue are completely obscured. The new rendering is a cleaner, lighter, and more readable experience:

San Francisco is a great example of the benefits of being able to see important underlying map data in addition to the transit lines. Now the city name, major landmarks and important roads are visible again:

To try this out for yourself, select "Transit" from the "More" drop-down on Google Maps in any city where transit is supported, or simply click on a transit station on the map itself. We hope that you have as much fun using our new transit maps as we did making them!

Posted by Jonah Jones, User Experience Designer, Google Maps

Planning your public transit ride doesn’t have to be a drag

Google Maps has allowed you to get public transportation directions in hundreds of cities around the world for a while now, helping you get to your destination without a car. But sometimes you’re not quite sure which destination to choose, and you want to try out multiple options. We often get asked if it will ever be possible to drag your transit route, just like you can do with driving directions. As of today, it is indeed possible! Now you can drag your start or end point to preview your various options for the most efficient itinerary.

Imagine that you are on a business trip to New York City, and you will stay at the Chelsea Hotel. You start planning your trip by searching for directions form JFK airport to the Chelsea Hotel. Then you realize that you can also take a flight to Newark, and you want to figure out which is more convenient for getting to your hotel. Now it’s as easy as picking up the marker at JFK (you’ll see instructions ”Drag to change route” when you hover over the marker):

..and drop it over Newark Airport:

As you drag the marker, we will calculate the new trip automatically in the background and show a tooltip with the time of the new trip. When you drop the marker back onto the map at your desired starting (or ending) point, you’ll see the left panel update with your new step-by-step transit directions. Just search, drag, and ride!

Posted by Noam Ben-Haim, Product Manager

NYC subway system on Google Maps

My wife and I moved out to New York last week, and we sure put Google Maps to use in our housing hunt. With Real Estate listings to help find a place, Street View to scope out the neighborhood, directions to help us find our broker, and local search to find nearby amenities, just about the only thing that we needed another source for was to see where the extensive subway lines ran. Until now!

We're happy to announce that you can now see New York's subway lines drawn out directly on Google Maps as part of the transit layer. To turn it on, just point Google Maps to somewhere in New York, click on the "More..." button at top-right, and select "Transit":

The colorful lines aren't just pretty to look at, they're also interactive. When you click on any station name, a bubble pops up with the names of the line that service the station, and all the other lines on the screen fade out.

This new feature compliments the New York transit directions we launched last September, for all services offered by the MTA, including bus, ferry, commuter rail, and of course the subway. We cover much more than the Big Apple, so look for the transit layer in other cities like Paris and Tokyo, and use transit directions with over 436 agencies around the world.

Having the MTA in the transit layer will certainly help me get my way around my new hometown, as I start to familiarize myself with the nation's largest public transit system. I can even pull up the layer on my mobile phone while on-the-go (read more on the Google Mobile Blog). We're happy to say that we found a great place in Brooklyn — and based on the leafy green trees and walk-up brownstones in Street View, some friends back in California are convinced we're moving to Sesame Street!

Posted by Jesse Friedman, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Autumn updates for Google Transit

The days may have just gotten a little bit shorter, but that's not going to stop the Google Transit team from working hard to add new agencies. Over the past few months, we've launched with several partners in many places all around the world.

If you're traveling to Europe, you may be particularly pleased with some of our newest additions in popular tourist regions. In France, we have completed the coverage of Bordeaux, a famous red wine hub, and an UNESCO World Heritage site. In Italy, we launched coverage for the entire regions of Tuscany, Reggio Emilia, and Brescia. If you are in need of some Spanish tapas and sun, the Asturias region in the north of Spain can offer you that -- and we can offer public transit to get you around. The Czech Republic now has the Student Agency and the city of Pardubice covered, and in the UK the launch of the East Anglia region joins the existing East Midlands and Southeast.

This represents great progress in Europe, adding partners in countries where coverage was previously quite thin. We're very excited about this, but we are still far from our end goal of having a public transit alternative for every driving directions search, so we're hoping to keep up our momentum.

We have not neglected the rest of the world, and we have launched many smaller regions in the US, such as Gainesville, Florida and Long Beach, CA. I'm particularly excited about the addition of Bear Transit in Berkeley, which is where Google Transit originated. We also launched our first routing in the Middle East, with data from the Roads and Transport Authority in Dubai, UAE. And coinciding with the announcement of the host of the 2016 Olympic games, we launched a full coverage for Rio de Janeiro. We also launched the first city in New Zealand - Wellington, the Kiwi capital.

Our mobile users also got special treatment. With the launch of Google Maps for Mobile 3.2, the transit layer is available on Symbian S60, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and the new Motorola DROID, and transit directions were added to the Palm Pre. This means now transit directions are available in Google Maps on all major smartphone platforms.

You can find more information about Google Transit and our current coverage at http://maps.google.com/transit.

Posted by Noam Ben Haim, Product Manager

Welcome to Boston: the MBTA on Google Maps

For my thirteenth birthday, one of my aunts gave me a gift I won't soon forget: a day in Boston. I grew up north of the city and, as a child, often visited the Museum of Science, Newbury Street, the Swan Boats, and elsewhere with my family, but my aunt's gift acknowledged the maturity and meaning associated with becoming a teenager. On a Saturday morning, she drove my cousin and me to Alewife Station and handed us MBTA tokens (there were no Charlie Cards at the time).

From that point on, I must have spent time nearly every weekend heading into Boston, riding the Commuter Rail from my hometown of Andover to North Station. In high school, the T carried me to concerts in Central Square and Kenmore Square. When I studied at Boston University, the Green Line ran through our main corridor, and again and again the trolleys, subways, and buses transported me around town. Like any regular public-transit commuter, I witnessed delays, congestion, and post-snowfall on-board slushiness, but the overall benefits of public transportation far outweighed any of those grumblings. To this day, whenever I'm home, after morning coffee with my dad, I take the MBTA into the Google Boston office in Kendall Square.

Now, all those routes that I -- and millions of other riders -- have traveled over the years can be planned with Google Maps. Today at South Station, we accompanied the Massachussetts Bay Transportation Authority to announce the availability of the MBTA's commuter rail, subway, bus, and ferry schedules through Google Transit, joining nearly all major U.S. transit agencies and more than 400 cities around the world in making their transit data available.

For locals and visitors alike, Google Transit makes it easier to search and discover public transportation options that get them into, around, and out of Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, Quincy, Somerville, and the surrounding areas -- or to travel to and from other MBTA-linked cities like Brockton, Gloucester, Lowell, Providence, and Worcester.

One of the great benefits of Google Transit is that it helps people discover the availability of public transit by showing a MBTA itinerary as an alternative to driving directions in Google Maps. But when you know that public transit is your first choice, you can also head to maps.google.com/transit for a complete trip planner, accessible both from your web browser and your mobile phone. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Don't worry about parking (and parking costs) when going to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park
• Consider taking public transport to and from Logan International Airport
• Navigate your way to one of Boston's municipal courts when summoned for jury duty
• Spend a summer afternoon, when the weather invites, at Carson Beach, Revere Beach, or Singing Beach
• If you're one of the many students moving to Massachusetts for college in the fall, test the best transit routes in advance so you'll feel like a local expert upon arrival
• Scope out 360-degree street-level views of the bus and subway stops in advance of your trip, using Street View

Google Transit also connects the MBTA's services with other local agencies already on Google Transit, like Lexington Lexpress, the MetroWest Regional Transity Authority, and Rhode Island Public Transit Authority, so it's easier to know where and when these services connect.

The Transit team here at Google appreciates all those who have been part of bringing public transit data to Google Maps in the region, such as the high-school student who worked to get the Lexpress on board, the "Put the MBTA on Google Transit!!!" Facebook group, and of course the team at the MBTA involved in making this happen. We all have our memories of coming and going, and I'm certain there are people of all ages in and around Boston who realize there's a city waiting for them to explore. Visit maps.google.com/boston to get started.

Posted by Sean Carlson, Global Communications & Public Affairs

Take a ride with LA Metro in Google Transit

The Los Angeles region is widely known for its extreme traffic, and a study released just this week by the Texas Transportation Institute reports that LA has the most significant congestion in the United States. It goes on to estimate that commuters in LA spent 485 million hours idling in traffic, wasting 367 million gallons of gas.

However, Los Angeles also has an extensive public transit network, operated by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro), and today we're excited to introduce them as the newest addition to Google Transit. Metro operates 5 rail lines and nearly 200 bus lines within Los Angeles County, logging an average of 1.5 million weekday boardings.

As a part of Google Transit, Metro's itineraries will now appear as an alternative with the "Public Transit" link when a user searches for driving directions within their service area to remind commuters of the availability of public transit. Turning on the Traffic layer in Google Maps to get an idea of what congestion awaits may provide even more motivation to try take advantage of Metro!

Los Angeles welcomed 4.7 million international visitors last year, so the ability to use the familiar Google Maps interface in a native language is another great benefit to tourists and potential Metro passengers. This announcement of Metro's participation in Google Transit also comes just a few weeks after they published their GTFS data to their developer site, so we hope to see more creative applications take advantage of the developer tools Metro provides.

Whether Metro's inclusion in Google Transit helps people discover the availability of public transit in LA, or makes it easier for people to plan their transit itineraries, we're excited to have such a large agency on board and hope it will help beat some of the infamous LA traffic.

Posted by Jessica Wei, Strategic Partner Development Manager, Google Transit

Dump the pump with new transit agencies in Google Maps

Did you know:

• Individuals can achieve an average annual savings of over $8,000 by taking public transportation instead of driving and by living with one less car?
• For every $1 invested in public transportation infrastructure, $6 is generated in economic returns to communities?
• Public transportation saves 900,000 automobile fill-ups each day – or 4.2 billion gallons of gasoline per year?
• Switching to public transportation can reduce individual carbon emissions by 20 pounds per day or 4,800 pounds per year?

This is why transit agencies around the country are celebrating Dump the Pump day, sponsored by the American Public Transportation Association, today to encourage more Americans to take public transportation. Depends on where you are, you may get free passes from your local transit agencies today!

Now, you may wonder how you can plan a transit trip easily if you're not familiar with your local agency. The answer is - go to Google Maps. So far more than 100 agencies in the United States have made their data available in Google Maps through Google Transit Partner Program. Recently we have added several new agencies:

• Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County, Houston, TX
• VIA Metropolitan Transit in San Antonio, TX (data available tomorrow)
• Utah Transit Authority, Salt Lake City, UT
• Metro St. Louis, St Louis, MO
• Foothill Transit, San Gabriel Valley, CA
• Riverside Transit, Riverside, CA
• Charlotte Area Transit System, Charlotte, NC
• Pinella Suncoast Transit Authority, St. Petersburg, FL

In addition, Los Angeles Metro, City of Edmonton, Houston Metro, and Calgary Transit have released their GTFS data feed to the public so that developers can create innovative transit applications to further promote the awareness of public transportation.

Now go to Google Maps on your computer or your cell phone, plan a transit trip, and go catch a train or bus. I bet your won't miss the congested highway or increasing gas price!

Posted by Jessica Wei, Strategic Partner Development Manager, Google Transit

Discovering cities with the Transit Layer

Earlier this year, we announced the launch of the Transit Layer, a feature that makes it easier for citizens and tourists around the globe to access public transportation line information in their cities. We’re continuously expanding the coverage of Transit Layer, and have added support for transit systems in China, Japan and Russia, which are some of the most complex and remarkable metro lines in the world. The Transit Layer is not only useful to plan a visit, but also to see a city's history, structure of transportation systems, and daily life. Let’s take a look at the Transit Layers for Shanghai, Tokyo and Moscow.

Shanghai (China):

China has launched subway layers for 10 cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Beijing's first subway line has been in operation since 1969 and Shanghai's subway system opened in 1995. Now, Shanghai has 8 metro lines, 162 stations and 225 km of tracks, making it the longest network in China, exceeding even the Hong Kong MTR. To get a sense of how widely used the subway system is, take a look at this image of the queues that can form during rush hour.

Tokyo (Japan):

Subways are the most popular and convenient transportation method in Tokyo; most of downtown Tokyo is easily accessible via subways.

The Tokyo Metro Ginza line (drawn in orange) was first opened in 1927. There were many trams at that time, but they have since been replaced by subways because of the increase in automobile usage and lack of capacity and speed. Thirteen lines are in operation today and they carry more than 2.9 billion passengers per year, making this the world's largest subway system.

One of the interesting things about the Transit Layer is that you can see the layout of the transit system. In Tokyo, for instance, you might wonder why the subways take a circuitous path around the central area and avoid it. This is because the area contains the Imperial Palace, which used to be the Edo Castle where the Shogun lived during the pre-modern era. Also, many of the subways are located under historically significant roads. Though Tokyo is filled with modern architecture, it has not been built from scratch, but rather it has been built on top of the old city.

Moscow (Russia):

The Moscow Metro is the world's second largest metro system (in terms of passenger rides) and quite possibly the most beautiful. If you ever come to Moscow, you should definitely visit the Metro (but it's best to avoid it during the rush hour if you have the choice!). Meanwhile, you can check out the Metro on the transit layer for Moscow, together with the bus, tram, trolleybus and monorail lines. We have also launched the detailed transit layer for St. Petersburg recently. All in all, we now provide Transit Layer coverage for 90 cities in 26 countries, including many of the worlds largest transit networks.

Posted by Issei Suzuki, Peng Chen and Vladimir Rychev, Software Engineers