Add locations in Google Maps/Transit
Google announced that they’ve added the capability for people to add and edit locations in Google Maps. What does this mean for riders and agencies who use Google Transit? Since Google Transit is integrated with Maps, then presumably this means that locations and place names people use to query transit directions that don’t currently show up will become query-able in Google Transit as people add them. Certainly, this is going to make a few of Trillium’s Google Transit-using clients happy, who have found that some local place-names don’t come up in Google Maps.
The natural language parsing for addresses and place names with Google Maps/Transit is already impressive (try entering from:acv to:moonstone beach, ca). It’s about to get better.
Trillium work in talk on transit data future
The Trillium-developed Redwood Transit System website and its use of Google Transit was featured in the updated version of a presentation the Portland TriMet CTO gave at APTA’s TransITech conference. See “Leveraging resources for customer information by exposing transit data” below.
The TriMet presentation about how TriMet has benefited from sharing their data with, and actively reaching out to, developers, and encouraging other transit agencies to do the same. This will make transit information more available, and tools for accessing and manipulating it less expensive and easier to use.
