San Francisco Bike Blog

I’m a huge fan of Google Transit - I think it would be fair to say I’m now, officially, a fanboy. Of course, I use it whenever I decide to leave the bike at home, but I have a feeling other people use it, too.

In terms of ease of use, I believe it is better than the average transit agency website scheduling tools by orders of magnitude. This means it is probably helping to pull people out of their cars. When I was thinking of phasing-out my car, I turned to my bike and Google Transit. It worked.

I’m a huge fan of ferries, too — see this, this, this, and this.

Google Transit does not yet provide information from Golden Gate Transit - which runs the bus service, nor Golden Gate Ferry, which runs the ferry service. Currently, when you try to get public transit directions from Google Transit for a trip from SF to Larkspur (one of my favorite North Bay destinations, also a ferry stop), you get the following message:

Your search for transit directions from san francisco, ca to larkspur, ca appears to be outside our current coverage area. Please consult our list of participating public transit agencies.

Get driving directions from san francisco, ca to larkspur, ca.

Talk about adding insult to injury - not only can we not get transit directions, but Google Transit suggests that I can get ‘driving directions’ there. No, thank you.

To make transit directions happen for a particular area which does not yet have coverage, all we have to do is ask/request/demand that the various transit agencies involved ‘hook up with Google Transit’. Google wants to play ball with everyone - they just need the scheduling data from the respective agencies, so we, as responsible citizens and transit advocates, need to make sure that data is made available to Google by asking our transit agencies nicely (pestering them) to provide the data. We can call, email, write a snail-mail letter, etc. Then it happens, then we’re all better off.

Google Maps already has the ferry routes painted on their maps - see the dashed, light blue lines below:

Golden Gate bus and ferry operations are actually under the umbrella of an organization called Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District - they run the Golden Gate Bridge, lots of buses to/from and through Marin and Sonoma counties, and the ferries that run to/from those places, too (Sausalito, Larkspur, etc.). There are a couple of other ferry agencies that run the Vallejo Baylink Ferry, and the East Bay Ferries - I didn’t get in touch with either of them yet.

I called up Golden Gate Transit yesterday and got to speak to Kellee Hopper, Marketing and Communications Director for Golden Gate Transit, and she gave me the scoop. Like many large transit agencies, Golden Gate Transit uses this software called HASTUS (which may be an acronym for??) by Montreal-based company Giro. Golden Gate Transit will upgrade their HASTUS software hopefully by Q1 of the new year, 2009, and that will then give them access to built-in tools for making their scheduling data available to Google Transit. She said they hoped to have their information integrated into Google Transit by Q2, 2009.

From a 2006 press release for the Giro HASTUS product (pdf):

HASTUS, the first scheduling system to be Google Transitâ„¢ ready

GIRO expands upon its “open system” philosophy

December 2006 – GIRO Inc. announced the addition of a generic HASTUS interface, fully compatible with the Google Transit™ specifications.

Google Transitâ„¢ is an innovative tool developed by the world leader in Internet search, to generate public transit itineraries (see www.google.com/transit). The Google Transitâ„¢ Trip Planner, with its international visibility, provides a complement to local trip planning tools that may be more tailored to the needs of each city and regular transit customers.

The Google Transit™ Trip Planner depends on the provision of data by transit agencies. Because of the deep market penetration of GIRO’s scheduling software globally, the availability of a Google Transit™ interface in the HASTUS product means that it will now be easy for many transit agencies to feed the Google Transit™ Trip Planner. As a result, a greater number of public transit customers will benefit.

“This extension is another concrete example of HASTUS’ open and fully accessible transit database, which is the basis for all HASTUS modules,” said Mr. Pierre Trudeau, VP Business Development at GIRO. “GIRO’s perspective is that the data is owned by the transit agency which can make unrestricted use of it. GIRO does not restrict access to its products’ database nor charges additional license fees for interfaces. This would go against our ‘open system’ philosophy.”

Google Transit is a trademark of Google Inc.

Not all transit agencies are big enough to have HASTUS or some other big, sophisticated scheduling and operations software package. If you find out that is the case after you speak with your transit agency, you might want to put them in touch with a firm like Trillium Transit, which specializes in Google Transit implementations.

I also got to speak to someone with the new Water Emergency Transportation Authority - WETA [That name is very disturbing to me.]. They don’t actually have much power yet, and they don’t actually run anything yet day-to-day — the formal handover of power will happen in about 18 months, and then another six months or so later, they will take over day to day operations. Time will tell if they end up taking over only most or all of the ferry routes to and from San Francisco. There’s been some talk of expanded ferry service, and you can see some of the proposed routes on their website — to and from SF we could have Antioch/Martinez, Berkeley/Albany, Hercules, Redwood City, and Richmond. And there is a South SF to Oakland route proposed, too. I might agree with the WETA website that ferry could in fact be the most civilized way to commute - if we consider only motorized transport. There’s a big christening-type ceremony starting around 11:15 AM for the new ferry - “Most Environmentally-Friendly in the World!” (their ‘Open House’ flyer says ‘Nation’, not ‘World’):

Gemini will be formally christened in a ceremony following a press conference at 11:15 a.m. on December 12 at Gate E, San Francisco Ferry Building.

Read the Press Conference and Christening Press Release (PDF, 97KB)

Come join us after the christening for an Open House aboard Gemini from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. and get for a first hand look.

See new photos of the most environmentally friendly ferry in the world!

Incidentally, when on the phone with Kellee Hopper of Golden Gate Transit, I mentioned that I was ‘mainly a bike guy’ and that the Bike+Ferry combination was awesome for us bikey folks, and she said it’s been great for them - that they had incredible success this summer with bikes on board, in particular the Sausalito route, with up to 100 bikes at a time making the crossing. I believe it. I know there’s already been talk about bikes stressing the ferry system - I have a feeling this trend of bikes+[real transit] is going to be a continuing trend. We’ve heard a bit about the ferries. We all know too well the Caltrain situation. When the SMART train is online I’m almost certain we’re going to see a ton of bikers using it. Walking, biking and train and ferry are all very dignified ways to travel - people like it, they’ll do it, they do it, and they’ll continue to do it — we just have to make it an option.

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