The Red Line was an utter mess this last week. Track work caused delays of up to 30 minutes in many places last weekend. A fire on Friday at the Friendship Heights station backed trains up during the morning rush hour. And DCist’s staff email threads were filled on Monday and Tuesday with complaints about Red Line trains being backed up for one reason or another, for reasons that remain to be discovered.
It’s information-deprived situations like these that lead people to wonder: What’s taking so long with that Google Transit integration with WMATA that we’ve been promised over and over and over again?
According to a report by Greater Greater Washington blogger Michael Perkins, the deal’s off: a Metro spokesperson says that “forming a partnership with Google was not in our best interest from a business perspective.” Wait, back up?
After months and months of saying that Google integration was imminent, Metro now believes that its brand new website serves up just as much information as a relationship with Google would. Far from it. True, the new WMATA Web site is better looking and offers an improved interface. But what about bus routing? One of the bigger disappointments with Metro’s online upgrade is that bus schedules are still rendered in bulky PDFs. On Google Transit, it takes mere seconds to find the right bus schedule and routing. Google might have taken over the role of the similarly stalled NextBus system, but that isn’t in the cards, either.
Like Greater Greater Washington says, this action is yet another example of Metro withholding the intel from its customers:
For a long time, WMATA has said they’re “working on it.” Unfortunately, they recently told us that they’ve decided not to participate at all. This is a very shortsighed decision for WMATA. The easier it is for people to find out about their transit options, the more people will ride transit. Keeping the data restricted, whether in a misguided attempt to coerce people into using WMATA’s new site or for any other reason, only hurts riders . . .
. . . Google Transit can add new features much faster than WMATA ever could. WMATA’s core competency is running trains and buses, which it performs quite well; Google’s is building Web sites.
That text is part of the preface to a petition to allow area residents to email WMATA to register their opinions about WMATA’s decision. Greater Greater Washington blogger David Alpert told DCist that response to the call for action has been impressive: At least 50 responses were registered in the first few hours since the form letter’s publication early Saturday morning. Metro riders seem to want Google capability, Metro’s new Web site notwithstanding.
Looking at the list of jurisdictions participating in Google Transit is dispiriting. Most American metropolitan areas, the nations of Japan and Switzerland, and wherever Walla Walla is: they’ve all integrated with Google T. To save negligible time and money, Metro scuttled a collaboration to match the unprecedented growth of and demand on the system.
