It’s an exciting day for ITO World as our latest project with Google Maps has gone live this morning. We have been working with Google for the past few months to convert live London Underground data from Transport for London (TfL) into a format suitable for use in Google Transit.
To try the feature, visit Google Maps and click the ‘Get directions’ button, select the public transit icon and search for a journey in London that uses the Underground. You will then be presented with the best route option and will be redirected onto an alternative route if there are delays, interruptions or closures on your planned journey.
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| Live alerts on Google Maps, with a little help from ITO! |
We have been working with Google for nearly a year now. We were initially contracted to convert TfL static schedules into an appropriate format for Google Transit which we have been doing on a weekly basis since then. This latest project, however, integrates TfL’s planned engineering works feed and Tube disruptions feed into their new 'real-time' Google Transit service. Google expect millions of people to benefit from this feature during the Olympics.
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| Google Maps users can avoid Tube disruption using the Transit feature |
All this has been made possible by TfL’s switch to Open Data over the past year which has been being championed by the Mayor of London and his team. Anyone who has been following us will know that we are firm supporters of Open Data and have worked with the Mayor’s office previously. We are particularly proud to have one of our visuals displayed on the London Data Store homepage banner!
You can read more about Google's new live service on their blog post.
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