Google Maps Does It Again

April 18, 2009 at 9:23 pm

For select cities, including Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco, in Google Maps you can now click on any transit stop and see an overlay of all transit routes in the system, with the routes accessible from that stop highlighted.

It’s a nice tool for everyday people and visitors to visualize the system.

UPDATE: Yes, onebusaway has had this forever.  That’s not the point, because no everyone knows about OBA, and if they did OBA couldn’t handle the bandwidth.

With Google maps, you pick up visitors and people just checking how to get from point A to point B.

12 Responses to Google Maps Does It Again

Morgan Wick says:


Click the “more” button and select “transit” to get the overlay without specific routes highlighted.

Tim says:


It’s been like that for months. Still no comparison to OneBusAway.

Daniel K says:


Which also has more up to date route data. Some new routes created in February for example.

47hasbegun says:


Both of them, unfortunately, don’t help me since I live in Snohomish County.


Now if only Google would do that for the entire Google Transit system.

Also, too bad it’s one bland color for all routes (so you can at a glance see a street with bus service, but not which bus goes down which street)

alexjonlin says:


In San Francisco, though, it has the correct line colors for the BART lines. It looks very cool.

Phillip Duggan says:


It’s fun to look at the whole system highlighted but I’d like to see JUST the single route I’m looking at along with all it’s stops on the map. That would be much more useful for what I’m usually trying to do…

Daniel K says:


onebusaway has that.

Go here and enter the route.

Phillip Duggan says:


Yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking actually. Though I don’t understand why Google lets me zoom in using the scroll wheel on my house and that never works when other people are embedding Google maps in their own products.

Tim says:


It’s a flag that has to be set when the webmaster implements Google Maps into their page. It’s literally just one line of code, but not enough people bother to add it.