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January 14, 2009

Transit Layer in Google Maps

Google Maps already shows information about public transportation when you get directions, but now you can see more transit data in a new layer. To enable the layer, click on "More..." and select "Transit" if the option is available.

Google Maps blog lists the cities where the new layer has been enabled and some of them aren't covered by Google Transit yet. "Whereas the main Google Transit product has the goal to provide full schedule information and routing, the objective of the Transit Layer is to overlay lines visually on Google Maps. Think of a virtual metro map on top of Google Maps -- even when we don't have itinerary planning available, we want you to be able to see public transit options that are available."

Here's the full list of cities where you can see the transit layer: Belo Horizonte, Berlin, Bordeaux, Brasilia, Cairo, Capetown, Caracas, Chicago, Copenhagen, Dallas, Dortmund, Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Ekaterinburg, Essen, Frankfurt, Genoa, Guadalajara, Hamburg, Helsinki, Johannesburg, Kazan, Köln, Lille, Lisbon, London, Lyon, Madrid, Marseille, Medellin, Mexico City, Melbourne, Monterrey, Montreal, Munich, Naples, Nizhniy Novgorod, Oslo, Paris, Perth, Portland, Porto, Porto Alegre, Prague, Pretoria, Recife, Rennes, Rio de Janeiro, Samara, San Francisco, Santiago, Sao Paulo, Seattle, Strasbourg, Toulouse, Tunis, Vienna, Warsaw.


8 comments:

  1. It just routed me from one part of London to another via an airport 60 miles away...

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  2. Seems like it still has bugs, I really wish Google would refine their products before release. The bugs in Google turned a lot of potential users away.

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  3. Pretty.

    Is it possible to see just the transit layer (without the streets underneath) just to see what it looks like?

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  4. No, but you can switch to terrain mode: the layer is much more prominent that way.

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  5. Thanks to Jorn Barger for the heads up here.

    This should be useful for people advocating for better transit here in the rust belt, to give some idea of what the scale and scope of comparable systems is.

    It would be really useful to have a national Amtrak route base in there too.

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  6. Google is missing a trick here. Clicking on a station raises a bubble with a link to web page for timetables (bahn.de in Frankfurt, for example). It would surely only take 5 minutes of a Google programmers time to get it to fill in the clicked on station name in the form on that page.

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  7. i would like to see this for Dublin, Ireland. i used it when travelling on holiday in paris and it was real useful to get around

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  8. Are they working on including other cities for the transit layer? It would be helpful and interesting to see this for smaller communities.

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