Google Maps has long offered transit trip planning, and with full knowledge of AC Transit’s routes and schedules helps many of our 200,000 daily riders use public transit. Now, with the addition of “real time” location data from every bus in the District’s fleet, customers will know if the next bus due at their stop is on time. And with service alerts imported straight from AC Transit’s website, riders will have descriptions of construction or special event detours and other temporary impacts on particular routes.
AC Transit bus riders can start planning a trip right from the home page of the district’s website, with the option to plan travel using either Google Maps or the Bay Area’s 511.org transit trip planner.
“Google Maps is a very popular trip planning tool for our riders. Adding real-time trip updates allows better planning and more certainty, and saves our riders time. It makes a great tool even better,” said AC Transit Board of Directors President Chris Peeples. “And the addition of service notices alerts riders to current and upcoming changes such as detours due to construction, parades and other major events.”
The district adheres to industry “open data” standards by sending this new real time data in compact form to Google via the General Transit Feed Specification-realtime (GTFS-RT).
A complementary new application programming interface (API) allows application developers easy and free access to the same data with additional filtering options. The District’s goal is to encourage app developers to build tools that better serve current riders and that attract new people to try public transit.
