Headway

As some people have noticed, right now it’s hard to get transit routing from Google Maps on iPhones, because Apple’s software grabs most Google Maps URLs and sends them to the built in Maps application. This situation will no doubt be improved in the future, but in the meantime, here’s a workaround.

To get Google transit routing on your iPhone, go to:

http://maps.google.com/transit

and do your search from there. This will give you plain-HTML transit results.

Last week I embarked on a whirlwind tour of Vancouver to help announce the the addition of TransLink routing to Google Maps. It was fun to get a chance to see the town for the first time (on Halloween night no less—the apparent Canadian tradition of setting off small fireworks on that night made things unexpectly lively). It’s a dramatic town, nudged into a healthy density by the surrounding mountains, which no doubt helps explain the towers springing up everywhere like so many glass saplings.

I really enjoyed the chance to meet some of the local transit bloggers like Richard Eriksson, Karen Quinn (ringleader of the upcoming Vancouver Transit Camp), and Paul Hillsdon. (Sadly, esteemed planning guru Gordon Price didn’t stick around to say hi, though he made up for it by providing a good transcript of my “giant crab” demo.)

(Public service announcement: bloggers, please put an email address somewhere on your site! There have been at least a few cases lately where I wanted to invite people to upcoming events but I couldn’t find a way to contact them privately.)

I also had the opportunity to sit down with a bunch of TransLink folks. Thanks to Bob, Brian, Cam, Dan, Gerry, Janet, Kirsten, and Patricia for taking the time to tell me about the things that they’re working on and the ambitious things they’d like to do in the future to encourage more ridership and to improve the rider experience. People seem to fixate on the negatives of their local transit agencies, but from my experience there are plenty of sharp people in every agency who are passionate about making things better, and from what I’ve seen TransLink is no exception. I hope that some of the ideas I heard from them will come to fruition!

Big news today: transit routing is now available side-by-side with driving directions on Google Maps! Here’s how it works: whenever you do a driving directions search on Google Maps in an area where Google has transit routing information, a “Take Public Transit” link appears at the top:

Clicking on that link allows you to see how you could make the same trip on public transportation (when possible), using the step-by-step instructions previously available on the standalone Google Transit site. For the first time, U.S. transit information is as easy to find as driving directions! Hopefully this will help inform people who had never realized that transit was a viable option for their trip.

Right now this works in the areas covered by Google Transit, and the team is working hard to add more transit systems of all sizes. If you work for an agency and you’d like to see your routes on Google Maps, send mail to labs-transit_content@google.com.

A Seattle-based pub trivia site just added a nifty transit directions feature to their site, combining their own location database with Google Transit’s Seattle routing. To see an example:

1. View one of their venue pages, such as The Great Nabob.
2. Enter a Seattle address into the “Current location:” box in the upper-right part of the page (for example, pike and broadway seattle), and click “Save”. A red X should appear on the map.
3. Hit reload in your browser to refresh the page. A “Get transit options (Experimental)” link should appear under the venue address on the left.
4. Click the link for Google Transit directions!

The feature is basically just creating a GET request URL containing the start and end addresses, along with the time that the quiz starts, for Google Transit. Nice work, guys!