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Today, Google announced a major expansion of its ability to warn users of crowded public transport in advance. The feature originally launched in June 2019 and covered around 200 cities around the world, using data reported by users similar to Waze to discover and forecast overcrowded trains and buses. Google is expanding this initial rollout from 200 cities to (eventually) more than 10,000 transit agencies in 100 countries, according to today’s announcement.
Unsurprisingly, Google Maps’ transit forecasts aren’t based solely on direct data reported by users. They use AI models trained on this data.
“We apply world-class anonymization technology and differential privacy techniques to historical location data to ensure that your data remains private and secure,” says the announcement, although we must point out that attempts to Anonymization of location data frequently fails.
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A user finds a bus route that will take him to a Google store in New York. The application lets the user know that the bus is currently not congested and allows them to change this state if the application made a mistake.
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In New York and Sydney, users benefit from an added level of granularity: the app predicts which individual cars on a given train are least congested.
Google
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Google Timeline Insights lets you be “aware” of how much time you spend on the road.
Google
Google says its transit crowd reports let users know if their transit line is likely “to have a lot of open seats, to reach full capacity, or to be anywhere or anywhere. between the two, ”allowing users to make a more informed decision about“ boarding or waiting for another train. ”In New York and Sydney, the program is piloting even more in-depth information, offering live information about the train. ‘congestion “down to the level of mass transit cars.” Today’s announcement also indicates that across the United States, transit is less congested after the morning rush hour and before the evening rush hour, information unlikely to surprise anyone who regularly uses public transport.
Maps is also upgrading its Timeline feature to include transit travel history, letting users know how much time they’ve spent and how far they’ve traveled by transit, on foot, by car, etc. If you don’t like this feature or trust Google’s “world-class anonymization technology”, you can turn off location history on your Android device completely. (Turning off location history will have a significant impact on ridesharing, weather, and mapping apps, among others, and may render some completely unusable.)
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