Where’s the peanut butter?!

Google Transit was rolled
out yesterday for Seattle and so far I’m not impressed. Yesterday
morning I asked it to get me from home to Microsoft, a commute I take
by bus almost every day. There are three basic options for this
commute:

1. direct via a 242: this takes about 45 minutes on paper but since
   it involves no transfers it is definitely the trip I always prefer

2. one transfer via a 48 to a 545 (to a shuttle to my building): this
   can be faster than the 242 sometimes but it always depends on how long
   the transfer takes, which can be seconds or can be a half hour.

3. two transfers via a [71|72|73] to a [43|48] to a 545 (to a shuttle
   to my building): the complexity here and number of transfers makes
   this suck - this only ever makes sense if I just missed a 48.

So which route did Google Transit recommend? #3. Maybe on paper it
made sense at the time, I don’t know, but href="http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/transportation/286592_google27.html?source=rss">they’re
saying that there were localized problems for people in the
Seattle area with the roll out yesterday. Today it’s recommending #2.

It’s really not quite godawful and I suspect it will mature and be
awesome. The interface is really simple and it’s very easy to use.
And just saying to people “hey, you know you could use the bus and it
might be a pretty easy option” is really, really awesome. But as
ipmlementations go, I’ll continue to use href="http://tripplanner.metrokc.gov/">Metro’s tripplanner and href="http://mybus.org/">mybus.org until they make it flexible
enough to accomodate two aspects of the commute:

1. For public transportation commutes, flexibility is crucial. I
   need more than one option because my schedule or, more likely, the bus
   schedule, is likely to change.

2. There are fuzzy aspects to the trip planning process. Given the
   choice between route A which takes 25 minutes with one transfer and
   route B which takes 30 minutes and is direct, I will almost always
   choose route B. If you need to get to your destination as quickly as
   possible, driving alone (or more likely bicycling, but that’s a
   subject for another conversation) is often the best choice. But
   public transportation riders know they can recoup the time spent in
   transit doing something and a solid chunk of uninterrupted time is
   usually more valuable than three smaller broken up chunks of time. href="http://tripplanner.metrokc.gov/">Tripplanner lets me
   prioritize routes for the fastest trip, fewest transfers, or least
   walking.

With a gazillion PhD’s and dollars behind Google, I’m sure
they can get Transit to match the feature set that my county public
transportation agency has rolling, but it might take a little time.

UPDATE 2006.09.28 It’s getting better all the time…

This morning I needed to go downtown and tried Google Transit again.
This time: 1) it picked a good (direct) route and 2) I found or it
gave me different route options. Also, it will now recommend the
direct route from my house to work - the exact route I complained
about it not finding yesterday. So things are definitely looking up!