A new look for Google Transit maps

At the beginning of last year, the Google Maps team launched the Transit Layer, showing the layout of public transportation networks on top of the map in over 50 cities worldwide. Since then, we have grown our coverage to nearly 450 cities and added more information to both the base maps and the transit layer.

We've now released a significant redesign of our transit maps that better highlights the information transit riders are most interested in seeing. Before, the transit map was placed on top of the base road map, obscuring some important information in the base map and competing visually with the complexity of the road network. With this redesign, we're changing the entire base map to put more focus on the transit lines, and lower the prominence of roads. We hope you'll agree that the result is a cleaner, less cluttered map that will make it easier for transit riders to get around.

Looking at the London Underground shows the immediate benefits of removing the clutter of the A-road badges, and the simplified map style which lets the transit lines and roads coexist more elegantly:

In the old transit map of New York, streets such as 8th and 7th Avenue are completely obscured. The new rendering is a cleaner, lighter, and more readable experience:

San Francisco is a great example of the benefits of being able to see important underlying map data in addition to the transit lines. Now the city name, major landmarks and important roads are visible again:

To try this out for yourself, select "Transit" from the "More" drop-down on Google Maps in any city where transit is supported, or simply click on a transit station on the map itself. We hope that you have as much fun using our new transit maps as we did making them!

Posted by Jonah Jones, User Experience Designer, Google Maps

Autumn updates for Google Transit

The days may have just gotten a little bit shorter, but that's not going to stop the Google Transit team from working hard to add new agencies. Over the past few months, we've launched with several partners in many places all around the world.

If you're traveling to Europe, you may be particularly pleased with some of our newest additions in popular tourist regions. In France, we have completed the coverage of Bordeaux, a famous red wine hub, and an UNESCO World Heritage site. In Italy, we launched coverage for the entire regions of Tuscany, Reggio Emilia, and Brescia. If you are in need of some Spanish tapas and sun, the Asturias region in the north of Spain can offer you that -- and we can offer public transit to get you around. The Czech Republic now has the Student Agency and the city of Pardubice covered, and in the UK the launch of the East Anglia region joins the existing East Midlands and Southeast.

This represents great progress in Europe, adding partners in countries where coverage was previously quite thin. We're very excited about this, but we are still far from our end goal of having a public transit alternative for every driving directions search, so we're hoping to keep up our momentum.

We have not neglected the rest of the world, and we have launched many smaller regions in the US, such as Gainesville, Florida and Long Beach, CA. I'm particularly excited about the addition of Bear Transit in Berkeley, which is where Google Transit originated. We also launched our first routing in the Middle East, with data from the Roads and Transport Authority in Dubai, UAE. And coinciding with the announcement of the host of the 2016 Olympic games, we launched a full coverage for Rio de Janeiro. We also launched the first city in New Zealand - Wellington, the Kiwi capital.

Our mobile users also got special treatment. With the launch of Google Maps for Mobile 3.2, the transit layer is available on Symbian S60, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and the new Motorola DROID, and transit directions were added to the Palm Pre. This means now transit directions are available in Google Maps on all major smartphone platforms.

You can find more information about Google Transit and our current coverage at http://maps.google.com/transit.

Posted by Noam Ben Haim, Product Manager