Google Maps for Mobile Phones Will Show Real Arriving Time

Google Maps will now be able to tell the users when their ride actually arrives. Thus far, the number of cities covered is limited to six: San Francisco, San Diego, Boston, Portland, Ore., Turin, and Madrid.

Indeed, the team of developers at Google HQ seems to be always working overtime. That is the only explanation to the advent of their new and exciting services that are rolled out for cell phone users. Today Google introduces another addition to Google Maps: Live Transit Updates.

Since today, the application for mobile and desktop will be able to tell the users when their ride is actually going to arrive, with the help of new live transit updates, according to the company’s blog post. The representatives of Google confirmed that the company partnered with a number of transit agencies in order to be able to integrate live transit information in 4 American cities and 2 European cities. The list includes Portland, Ore., San Francisco, San Diego, and Boston in the US and Turin and Madrid in Europe.

Earlier, transit riders could in most cases only tell when the specific ride was scheduled to arrive, but not when it actually would. Now, Live Transit Updates feature, implemented by Google Maps, will change all of that. It works the following way: when the user clicks on a transit station or plan a transit route using Google Maps, the system will find out whether there are any delays or alerts connected to their specific trip. As a result, the user will see “live departure times”, which will be indicated with a special icon, as well as service alerts.

Although the feature is currently limited to only 6 cities throughout the world, the company promises to work over expanding public transit partners to more locations in the nearest future.