Google transit trip planner
By Tim Finin on Thursday, December 8th, 2005 at 8:14 pm.Maybe Google Transit will succeed in making public transportation work in the US where others (e.g., Governments) have failed.
“Google Transit Trip Planner enables you to enter the specifics of your trip — where you’re starting, where you’re ending up, what time of day you’d like to leave and/or arrive — then uses all available public transportation schedules and information to plot out the most efficient possible step-by-step itinerary. You can even compare the cost of your trip with the cost of driving the same route!
At the moment we’re only offering this service for the Portland, Oregon metro area, but we plan to expand to cities throughout the United States and around the world.”
It does fill a gap. Public transportation in the US is provided by a mix of national, regional, local and commercial organizations. There’s no one to organize and integrate all of the information, or even to identify who the providers are. The semantics of travel is not overly complicated, there are a finite number of transportation modes, and these share much of the ontology (begin and end times, schedules, costs, waypoints, etc.).
Related posts: • Google mean time to index; • Unlock your cell phone; • Google Maps;
Ebiquity Blog
December 9th, 2005 at 9:42 am
Similar to transport direct in the UK. It’s things like this that are going to make a real diffirence to how people travel.
http://www.transportdirect.info/