Google posed a challenge to all the attendees of the American Public Transportation Association's recent TransITech conference: get your city on Google Transit by Earth Day 2008. We've written before about how great a tool it is, and were proud to help instigate it. Transit now shows up as an option for every "driving directions" trip you type into Google Maps (if your city is hooked up), encouraging the use of public transit and making it easy for those that would otherwise never even try it. It's a win for the transit agencies, too, because their specialized trip-planner websites are all made with expensive proprietary software, while Google's system is free and they publish their API.

If your city isn't hooked up, you can play along at home by writing your local transit agency and telling them to join the challenge. Get your city online by Earth Day! You can send them this link for all the information they need on how to get their data into Google's system.