A live sat-nav app for rail passengers?

[Sonik]

I don't wish to sound unduly negative (!) as I'd love such a service to be available, thinking of many people who would benefit and perhaps have more confidence to travel on public transport and not just drive or get a taxi (or not go at all), but it really does seem like if Google can't already do it, it's probably not easy.

Personally I think real time tracking showing connections etc. is entirely within Google's technical capability, it would be well used, and with a little imagination they would have no issues finding multiple ways to monetize it e.g. through ticket booking, saleable market data about consumer movement, advertising of services available on-route etc.

The issue I see is that all the main tech companies (Google, Apple etc.) are American and the car-centric USA simply does not use public transport very much. US transit systems are poorly integrated, many don't even take contactless let alone PAYG; transit is largely viewed as a lower class or niche thing that does not present sufficient revenue opportunity for a large tech company to commit sufficient resources. Hence we have many feature-rich and user-friendly apps for driving, ride hailing and booking flights but the functionality around using public transport (trains, busses) is much less developed.

It's also the case that public transport data sources are essentially bespoke (the UK is quite advanced here to be fair, compared to most other countries) so there is a significant administrative burden in designing and maintaining the integration with an app, for a much smaller addressable market in each individual country. By contrast e.g. Airline booking systems, have long used global, common shared data platforms, and road traffic data simply aggregates GPS feedback from multiple users. This is an area where perhaps the EU needs to take a lead in establishing a standardized interface for real time transit data, something that is already being discussed but will take a while to navigate the politics, and the USA of course will always make their own rules.

We do have a range of excellent third party apps for public transport, but these are mostly produced by more 'enthusiast' type developers who (no disrespect) don't have the resources, consumer insight or commercial motivation to produce more user friendly, fully integrated solutions.

 

[fandroid]

Google are surprisingly good at providing realtime journey planning on public transport. My courier colleagues use it a great deal, as have I in places like Germany where the data comes from multitudinous transport providers. The only problem is that some refuse to let Google have access to their data. So it's suck it and see depending on which city you are in. The fallback being to try to identify the name of the local transport undertaking's own website. (Not always straightforward!)

 

[jon0844]

Google is extremely good at taking almost random data sources and extracting information in a suitable manner to integrate with its own systems.

Take the way it pulls content from websites and blogs, working out how to summarise content, pull ratings, author information and so much more - even if every site formats things different and doesn't use consistent style tags etc. Of course, Google started in the search business and it does it very well (even if these days it seems to purposely exclude a lot of content, so finding answers to questions is made harder because most forums aren't included on search results anymore).

As such, it could likely grab data even without an official feed.. but likewise it can fail at any moment, or not necessarily be consistent with other data - such as the difference between pulling info from Darwin or Trust. One might show booked information and not amendments, and so the data shown is then useless during specific types of disruption.

As I've said before, and Sonik summarised even more eloquently, it can always be done but I am just not sure it actually would be.