If you’re heading to a casual celebration not so far from home, walking or public transit might be your best option. The Google Maps app will give your walk time ETA along with a few transit route options with real-time schedules, updates and fares.
Google Maps can also help you grab an Uber, if arriving by bus or train isn’t your holiday style. You can see the estimated trip duration, pickup time and estimated cost once you scroll down to the bottom of the app's transit option screen.
Stay safe with Maps Minutes Hacks and enjoy your New Year’s celebrations wherever they take you.
Posted by Dai Pham, Head of Geo and Google Maps Marketing
Here’s how it works: When you’re in navigation mode, simply tap the magnifying glass at the top right corner in the app. Pick a category from the drop down menu and you'll see a few options, along with ratings of businesses, prices at gas stations, and how much time the detour will add to your trip. Once you choose a place, the stop is automatically incorporated into your route. Can’t type and tap while driving? You can use voice commands instead.
Every minute counts. Save more time with Google Maps hacks. Next up: turn-by-turn navigation even when you’re offline.
Posted by Dai Pham, Head of Geo and Google Maps Marketing
Riders on the nation’s second largest subway, Metrorail in Washington, D.C., can now see live service alerts, including unplanned delays and scheduled track work, straight from Metro’s Control Center on Google Maps. To adjust your travel around the alerts you see, simply choose another suggested route or change your departure time.
Get service alerts on Google Maps
With transit information in Google Maps you get pick-up locations, departure times, estimated travel time, and even fare amounts for 800 cities* across more than 25 countries around the world – that’s information for 100 million miles of daily public transit trips at your fingertips.
Download Google Maps on your Android device or iPhone to get public transit information on the go. And if you represent a transit agency that would like to participate in Google Maps, please visit our site for transit agency partners.
Posted by Soufi Esmaeilzadeh, Partnership Development Manager, Google Maps
*Live trip updates are available in select cities.
Get transit service alerts on your desktop browser
If you’re looking to find the best route to see a concert after work or checking for any expected delays when already running late, this feature works when you’re online via maps.google.com and Google Maps for Mobile on Android. To adjust your travel around the alerts you see, simply choose another suggested route or change your departure time.
Get transit service alerts on Google Maps for Android
We’re regularly adding new cities and features globally and looking forward to continuing our efforts to make travel by public transportation a better experience in more than 400 regions around the world. For everybody who lives in one of New York City’s five boroughs, commutes in and out every day or is visiting for business or vacation, we hope today’s update improves the ease and efficiency of your trips around the city.
Posted by Csaba Garay, Transit Partner Technology Manager, Google Maps
Last summer we announced live transit updates, providing travelers with up-to-date information when planning their trips. We are excited about adding real time alerts for the 1 billion passengers that use the Underground every year.
In addition to the service alerts in real time, we’ve included planned engineering works for the weekends in our journey planner as well. When planning a trip for the coming weekend, we will show you the relevant subway alerts as part of the directions results. You can plan a trip for the weekend by changing the departure time in the ‘Get directions’ tab. Should there be planned engineering works for your route, you won’t run into any surprises on the day of travel.
As usual, this information is available on maps.google.co.uk for desktop and mobile, but also on Google Maps for Android. So even when you’re on the go, you’ll always be informed of the latest status of the Underground. Just tap on a station to see if there are any alerts active, or get directions to your destination to see if an alert affects your travels.
Whether you call London home or you’re one of the expected 31 million tourists visiting the city this year, we know that the addition of service alerts to Google Maps will make your travels across the city easier, faster and more convenient.
Posted by Thijs van As, Associate Product Manager, Google Transit
Search layers were first introduced in Google Maps a few years ago, and at last, they’ve recently made their way to Google Earth. Search layers enable you to see all the results of your search on the map at once, not just the top ten, making it easy to find clusters of certain types of businesses like fast food restaurants or coffee shops. One of the more entertaining uses of search layers that I’ve found has to do with a road that will be familiar to anyone who’s visited California: El Camino Real. Stretching from Sonoma Valley to San Diego, El Camino is a great place to find shops and restaurants of all kinds - and lots of them! Here’s a search layer for all the pizza places in the San Francisco Bay area; can you spot El Camino?
Search in Google Earth is much more than a pretty face, though. Just beneath the surface lies the powerful KML language, which you can use to take full control of your searches. Right-click on any search listing to save it to My Places or copy it as KML text, or click one of the icons below the search results to save or copy everything all at once. Save your walking directions to My Places and start a tour of the route to get turn-by-turn directions from the comfort of your chair. You can also click on “History” below the search field to see all of your recent searches at once, and selectively hide and show results to get, say, a picture of the top ten hotels and crêpe restaurants in Paris, for optimal crêpe-eating efficiency.
We’ll continue to improve the search experience in Google Earth, so stay tuned, and keep those searches coming!
Posted by Brian Ellis, Software Engineer, Google Earth
Public transport directions are available on both Google Maps and Google Maps for mobile, so you always have access to a trip planner. When you’re on mobile, Maps even uses your current location to determine the best trip to your destination. Just search for your destination location, select it on the map and choose the “Directions” option. The suggested trips will be based on your location by default, and provide you multiple alternatives whenever possible.
If you’re using an Android-powered device, you can also get public transport directions with Transit Navigation (Beta) in Google Maps. With this new feature, which we launched earlier this month, you’ll get alerts when it’s time to get off the bus or train at your destination or to make a transfer. Transit Navigation is available in all regions where public transport directions are available, including London.
TfL is among the first agencies in a major European city to make its timetable information publicly available through the London Datastore. We’re strong supporters of open data and bringing information out into the open, and believe that making information publicly accessible can be an enormous engine of economic growth and innovation. ITO World has been a great partner in this launch by ensuring TfL’s data was adapted correctly and ready for our use.
Public transport directions are available for all Underground, bus, tram and Docklands Light Railway (DLR) lines, and we’ll include more public transport information as soon as it’s available. Whether you use public transport every day or infrequently, as a commuter, on a business trip or as a tourist, we hope that public transport directions in London make planning your trips more convenient!
Posted by Thijs van As, Associate Product Manager, Transit Directions
Live transit departure times after tapping on a station
Live service alerts when receiving transit directions
Live departures and alerts on desktop
We’re working with our public transit partners to help them provide live data to more people in more cities. You can get live transit updates in the latest version of Google Maps for mobile (requires Android 1.6+), as well as Google Maps on all supported desktop and mobile browsers.
Public transportation is a vital part of city infrastructure and can help alleviate congestion and reduce emissions. But planning your trip on public transit can be challenging, especially when there are multiple transit agencies and you need to use information from multiple sources to figure out the best route. With mapping tools like the transit feature, we’re working to make that easier.
Directions are also available on Google Maps for mobile—so if you’re graduating from GWU and want to meet some friends in Adams Morgan to celebrate, it’s as easy as pulling out your phone. If you’re using an Android device, for example, search for [Adams Morgan] in Google Maps, click on the Places result and select “Directions.” Switch to Transit in the upper-left corner and find out which bus gets you there fastest.
Wherever your journey takes you, whether using public transit, driving, biking or walking, we hope Google Transit directions in D.C. make finding your way a little easier.
Posted by Noam Ben Haim, Product Manager, Google Maps
You can see a link to public transit options directly in your driving directions, together with the estimated travel time and number of transfers, for areas where we have transit coverage. This link will appear based on whether public transportation seems like a good alternative for your trip. Similarly, if you’re viewing public transit directions, we may add driving (or taking a taxi) as an alternative.
This feature is currently available in New York, San Francisco, Madrid and Zürich, and we plan to roll this out for more cities in the coming weeks.
We work hard to provide the right results to get from A to B, but sometimes riders have their own preferences. For example, you might not mind a longer journey if it means fewer transfers; or you may prefer traveling by bus or train, rather than subway, to have views of your route. You can now specify these preferences and alter your route results by clicking the “Show options” link below your destination:
We hope that this new feature makes it easier for you to find your way! To get started, please visit maps.google.com/transit.
Looking at the London Underground shows the immediate benefits of removing the clutter of the A-road badges, and the simplified map style which lets the transit lines and roads coexist more elegantly:
In the old transit map of New York, streets such as 8th and 7th Avenue are completely obscured. The new rendering is a cleaner, lighter, and more readable experience:
San Francisco is a great example of the benefits of being able to see important underlying map data in addition to the transit lines. Now the city name, major landmarks and important roads are visible again:
To try this out for yourself, select "Transit" from the "More" drop-down on Google Maps in any city where transit is supported, or simply click on a transit station on the map itself. We hope that you have as much fun using our new transit maps as we did making them!
Posted by Jonah Jones, User Experience Designer, Google Maps
As you drag the marker, we will calculate the new trip automatically in the background and show a tooltip with the time of the new trip. When you drop the marker back onto the map at your desired starting (or ending) point, you’ll see the left panel update with your new step-by-step transit directions. Just search, drag, and ride!
We're happy to announce that you can now see New York's subway lines drawn out directly on Google Maps as part of the transit layer. To turn it on, just point Google Maps to somewhere in New York, click on the "More..." button at top-right, and select "Transit":
The colorful lines aren't just pretty to look at, they're also interactive. When you click on any station name, a bubble pops up with the names of the line that service the station, and all the other lines on the screen fade out.
This new feature compliments the New York transit directions we launched last September, for all services offered by the MTA, including bus, ferry, commuter rail, and of course the subway. We cover much more than the Big Apple, so look for the transit layer in other cities like Paris and Tokyo, and use transit directions with over 436 agencies around the world.
Having the MTA in the transit layer will certainly help me get my way around my new hometown, as I start to familiarize myself with the nation's largest public transit system. I can even pull up the layer on my mobile phone while on-the-go (read more on the Google Mobile Blog). We're happy to say that we found a great place in Brooklyn — and based on the leafy green trees and walk-up brownstones in Street View, some friends back in California are convinced we're moving to Sesame Street!
Posted by Jesse Friedman, Associate Product Marketing Manager
If you're traveling to Europe, you may be particularly pleased with some of our newest additions in popular tourist regions. In France, we have completed the coverage of Bordeaux, a famous red wine hub, and an UNESCO World Heritage site. In Italy, we launched coverage for the entire regions of Tuscany, Reggio Emilia, and Brescia.Ifyou are in need of some Spanish tapas and sun, the Asturias region in the north of Spain can offer you that -- and we can offer public transit to get you around. The Czech Republic now has the Student Agency and the city of Pardubice covered, and in the UK the launch of the East Anglia region joins the existing East Midlands and Southeast.
This represents great progress in Europe, adding partners in countries where coverage was previously quite thin. We're very excited about this, but we are still far from our end goal of having a public transit alternative for every driving directions search, so we're hoping to keep up our momentum.
We have not neglected the rest of the world, and we have launched many smaller regions in the US, such as Gainesville, Florida and Long Beach, CA. I'm particularly excited about the addition of Bear Transit in Berkeley, which is where Google Transit originated. We also launched our first routing in the Middle East, with data from the Roads and Transport Authority in Dubai, UAE. And coinciding with the announcement of the host of the 2016 Olympic games, we launched a full coverage for Rio de Janeiro. We also launched the first city in New Zealand - Wellington, the Kiwi capital.
You can find more information about Google Transit and our current coverage at http://maps.google.com/transit. Posted by Noam Ben Haim, Product Manager
Now, all those routes that I -- and millions of other riders -- have traveled over the years can be planned with Google Maps. Today at South Station, we accompanied the Massachussetts Bay Transportation Authority to announce the availability of the MBTA's commuter rail, subway, bus, and ferry schedules through Google Transit, joining nearly all major U.S. transit agencies and more than 400 cities around the world in making their transit data available.
For locals and visitors alike, Google Transit makes it easier to search and discover public transportation options that get them into, around, and out of Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, Quincy, Somerville, and the surrounding areas -- or to travel to and from other MBTA-linked cities like Brockton, Gloucester, Lowell, Providence, and Worcester.
One of the great benefits of Google Transit is that it helps people discover the availability of public transit by showing a MBTA itinerary as an alternative to driving directions in Google Maps. But when you know that public transit is your first choice, you can also head to maps.google.com/transit for a complete trip planner, accessible both from your web browser and your mobile phone. Here are a few ideas to get you started:
Don't worry about parking (and parking costs) when going to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park
If you're one of the many students moving to Massachusetts for college in the fall, test the best transit routes in advance so you'll feel like a local expert upon arrival
However, Los Angeles also has an extensive public transit network, operated by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro), and today we're excited to introduce them as the newest addition to Google Transit. Metro operates 5 rail lines and nearly 200 bus lines within Los Angeles County, logging an average of 1.5 million weekday boardings.
As a part of Google Transit, Metro's itineraries will now appear as an alternative with the "Public Transit" link when a user searches for driving directions within their service area to remind commuters of the availability of public transit. Turning on the Traffic layer in Google Maps to get an idea of what congestion awaits may provide even more motivation to try take advantage of Metro!
Los Angeles welcomed 4.7 million international visitors last year, so the ability to use the familiar Google Maps interface in a native language is another great benefit to tourists and potential Metro passengers. This announcement of Metro's participation in Google Transit also comes just a few weeks after they published their GTFS data to their developer site, so we hope to see more creative applications take advantage of the developer tools Metro provides.
Whether Metro's inclusion in Google Transit helps people discover the availability of public transit in LA, or makes it easier for people to plan their transit itineraries, we're excited to have such a large agency on board and hope it will help beat some of the infamous LA traffic.
Posted by Jessica Wei, Strategic Partner Development Manager, Google Transit
This is why transit agencies around the country are celebrating Dump the Pump day, sponsored by the American Public Transportation Association, today to encourage more Americans to take public transportation. Depends on where you are, you may get free passes from your local transit agencies today!
Now, you may wonder how you can plan a transit trip easily if you're not familiar with your local agency. The answer is - go to Google Maps. So far more than 100 agencies in the United States have made their data available in Google Maps through Google Transit Partner Program. Recently we have added several new agencies:
Now go to Google Maps on your computer or your cell phone, plan a transit trip, and go catch a train or bus. I bet your won't miss the congested highway or increasing gas price!
Posted by Jessica Wei, Strategic Partner Development Manager, Google Transit
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