Steve Reads

Bostonians got a nice bit of news last week: the MBTA (Boston’s subway, bus, commuter rail and inner-harbor ferry provider) finally hooked their route information into Google Maps. This was a long time coming. I read a link a while back, which I can’t seem to find now, explaining just how simple the format Google required from public-transit providers was; so I find the delay mysterious, but welcome.

The link above notes that “unlike the T’s website, Google Transit cannot provide real-time updates about service changes and delays.” Interestingly, unlike the T’s website, the T’s website cannot provide real-time updates about service changes and delays.

What makes this much, much cooler than the MBTA website is that Google contains mass-transit maps for lots of other cities. If it’s not possible now, it surely will soon be possible to get from one side of the country to the other on Google Maps using only mass transit.

If Google isn’t already thinking of ways to sell Greyhound or Amtrak tickets through Maps, they’re much more foolish than I expect. First buses and trains, then airlines. I want to get from my house in Cambridge to where I used to live in D.C.: Google tells me that I should walk to the T stop near my apartment, take the red line to South Station, hop on the silver line to Logan, take an AirTran flight to BWI, take a WMATA shuttle to the Greenbelt stop, hop on the green line, take it to the U St stop, and walk 4/10 of a mile to my old apartment.

Only Google Maps is in a position to offer this sort of end-to-end, multimodal mapping. And they’re the only service that has any incentive to, for instance, offer you routes on either Amtrak or Greyhound or any of the airlines; Orbitz and Kayak can’t do that, and certainly no individual transport company has any reason to do it.

Once that’s in place, you can start talking about other clever bits: “Do you anticipate that you’ll be making this trip more than four times per month? Then you might want to buy an Amtrak pass and a CharlieCard; the total cost of doing so would be $N, whereas it would be $M to buy each ticket individually.”

Then hook it up with the various SpeedPass/EZPass-type systems that get you through toll plazas on highways in the northeast. Hook it up with on-time statistics for the various flights, trains, buses, and automobile commutes. The number of directions in which this could be extended is limitless, and Google is sitting right at the nexus, collecting a little fee for the convenience of buying all your passes in one place. Imagine instead a single card, the GooglePass, that replaces your train pass, your commuter-rail punch card, your EZPass, your airline boarding pass … You can sign into your Google account if you lose it, if you want to re-up, etc.

This may all sound pie in the sky, but I would be shocked if Google weren’t already at least thinking this way.