Print
Email
Print Edition Stories
MHT's Galen Moore: New 'hyperlocal' web trend
Map of New England mapping companies
If you’ve ever stood waiting for Boston’s MBTA, wondering whether it would have been faster to walk, starting today you can satisfy your curiosity.
The Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority and Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) announced integration of Google Transit with the T’s online tables of schedules and route maps. Now, users of Google’s geographic information system (GIS), Google Maps, have three choices when it comes to mode of transportation: by car, on foot, or by public transit.
“With Google Transit, travelers unaware of the convenience of public transportation can do research and choose for themselves,” MBTA general manager Daniel Grabauskas said in a written statement issued today.
What Grabauskas may not know is, one of the engineers on the Google Transit project prefigured the T’s foray into GIS in 2005, with an unauthorized mashup of transit schedules with maps of the Boston area. Joe Hughes developed the tool while living in Boston in 2005, and published it to his blog, retrovirus.com. His application scraped the MBTA’s online schedules and route maps, allowing any Internet user to query nearby MBTA routes and schedules by location. Before moving to Boston in 2002, he’d set up a similar system in Pittsburgh, where he attended Carnegie-Mellon University. In 2005, not long after he built the MBTA hack, he moved to Mountain View, Calif., to take an engineering job at Google’s headquarters there.
“Most of us on this project are transit geeks at heart,” said Hughes. “I’d like to see public transit information as essential a part of any map you might see as any other mode of transportation.”
Since 2006, the T has offered its own Google Maps-based wayfinding application, Trip Planner, via its website, mbta.com. Somerville-based web design firm RDVO Inc. helped with the T redesign.
Boston riders accustomed to using Trip Planner may not see a huge leap forward in the new Google integration. The transit wayfinding capabilities are similar, but unlike the T’s website, Google Transit cannot provide real-time updates about service changes and delays.
However, for travelers who use surrounding regional transit authority systems to connect with MBTA service, the T’s integration with Google will provide door-to-door wayfinding that crosses the boundaries among neighboring transit systems.
First rolled out in Portland, Ore., in 2005, the system is already deployed with more than 400 transit authorities, including in Massachusetts, the Cape Cod, Lexington, MetroWest, Pioneer Valley and Rhode Island transit authorities.
For other cities that may want to join, Google has tried to make its specifications as transit-friendly as possible, Hughes said. They are designed to accommodate the inelegant but widely used comma-separated value (CSV) format. Additionally, from early on, Google has offered open-source tools for its transit data feed specification, designed to help third parties develop further innovations on top of the Google Transit offering.
RSS Feeds
Comments (2)
Please Login/Register to post comments.