One of the biggest obstacles to people using public transportation is learning how the system works--where to go, when to go, etc. Any transit agency worth its salt has trip-planning tools available online, but they generally suffer from poor-to-horrible interfaces, due to lack of development money. This keeps riders away due to confusion. Even if a good system exists in one city, it is always different from that of another city, and newcomers won't know where to find it. Having transit trip-planning data readable and presentable by a clean, easy-to-understand, universal tool will make a big difference. It looks like that's starting to happen.
Google now does public transit. At least, it does for Portland, Oregon. Their experimental rollout has all the schedule & route data of TriMet (the local transit system) with an interface that combines the best of Google maps with the best of current transit trip-planners. It tells you where to walk to, what lines to take when, plots it all out on the map (both walking and riding, with flags to differentiate), and tells you how much it will cost. It even compares the cost of your trip to the cost of driving (for instance, going from the airport to downtown costs $1.80 by transit and $4.27 by car!)
The implementation is still experimental, and there are a couple small bugs and loose ends to be found (sometimes not all the buses in your route show up until you click on the list, and it would be nice if the map showed walking and riding in different colors), but it's already the best interface a trip planning system has ever had. For instance, there's no need to fill out a form to plan your trip, you can just type your start & end addresses (and a time, if you like) into the "get directions" field. It lists your main departure time plus a few subsequent times, so you can see how often the bus runs without needing to click through to a schedule. It labels the modes of transit (bus, light rail, etc.), and tells you the title of each ride (like "75 to St. Johns") you don't accidentally get on the one going in the opposite direction.
Google said on their blog that they chose Portland because "Tri-Met, Portland's transit authority, is a technological leader in public transportation. The team at Tri-Met is a group of tremendously passionate people dedicated to serving their community. And Tri-Met has a wealth of data readily available that they were eager to share with us for this project." The next step will hopefully be to make the system universal, so that Google (or other map providers) will not have to hassle with all the different proprietary data formats for every city's system, and so that people who want to travel between different city's systems (or mix driving with transit) don't have to use multiple tools, they can have one-stop-shopping to plan their trips. As we've suggested before, this will probably mean an open-standard XML or other universal translator for trip planning data.
[Blatant horn-tooting:] When we wrote that earlier article, TriMet's Bibiana McHugh contacted us, because she had had a similar idea; it turned out that some folks at Google had as well, but the TriMet & Google people didn't know how to connect with each other. We were able to make that connection, and six months later, the first step is reality!
