Living Car Free - Google Transit

I was pleased to see my city now included in Google Transit, which is a public transit trip planner.

The areas now covered are Burbank, Orange County, San Diego, Tampa, Honolulu, Duluth, Reno, Eugene, Portland, Pittsburgh, Austin, and Seattle. Looks like they also have complete rail, airline and ferry coverage in Japan.

Caution: It's imperfect. I used it to plan a bus trip to the city courthouse tomorrow (jury duty), but the result was not as good as what I came up with myself. Among other things it called for a transfer where none was required, it left only a six minute margin of error for that transfer where my judgment is that ten minutes are required, and it estimated walking time for a certain distance as nine minutes where it takes me 16 minutes.

Edit: I forgot to give the link.
http://www.google.com/transit

What makes Google any better than the maps, schedules and web sites that are provided by the various transit companies?

What makes Google any better than the maps, schedules and web sites that are provided by the various transit companies?
The websites for local transit systems tend to be amateurish mish-moshes of Flash, PDF, and whatever else people grab, sometimes working only with Microsoft Explorer and showing up blank or scrambled with other browsers. Usability problems include problems like the local trip planner referring to "Route 700" when in fact every other document and sign in the system calls it the "Red Line" of the light rail.

Route maps are often individual PDFs with a skeleton street sketch that you can't place in context unless you already know those parts of town. Printed route information is fragmented, inconvenient to obtain, and goes out of date every six months.

Google has the opportunity to define a standard format for transit information and make it easy to access. The ideal would be for a travelling visitor to be able to use local transit systems without a lot of trouble. Whether they will succeed is of course not clear at present. For example I think they lack the ability to display a zoomable transit map for a local area. But it's a start.