Why No Google Transit

January 16th, 2009

We get a lot of questions about Google Transit and why we are not using it.

Google Transit has been on our "radar" for a while now--well over a year, actually. There are several factors that are holding us back from joining.

Google only accepts feed updates once every two weeks. This generally isn't a problem, as we only do major route updates three times a year. The bigger problem is that, with over 1800 unique transit trips, we occasionally make mistakes in times, stops, etc (gasp! I know!). Waiting two weeks to fix an error that could potentially cause someone to miss their bus is just unacceptable customer service to us.

In addition, there still needs to be a great deal of human error-checking and proofreading. We already dedicate a lot of time to maintaining our online schedules and trip planner. At this point, we don't have the staff resources to proofread and troubleshoot two sets of schedule information.

We definitely realize the value of Google Transit, so I would not say that we'll never join the system. The more agencies that join the system, the better it is. We're just waiting for Google to mature the product a little more before we decide whether we want to dedicate the staff resources to creating and maintaining a feed.

Hope that gives you a little insight into our thought process as we've considered Goggle Transit.