London — Just in time to cater the massive number of travelers to the London Olympics, search engine behemoth Google on Monday said that it has significantly enhanced its Maps capability for the United Kingdom, in addition to endorsing a deal with the ticketing site TheTrainline, to provide public transport information on Google Maps so that users could actually book tickets for train journeys.
Moving forward, the companies stated that the service is accessible at maps.google.co.uk, which would include extensive timetable information, where British train travelers can now search for journeys across the country easily with more than 2,500 stations and 170,000 trips nationwide available at their fingertips, in addition to 8,000 bus stops and over 250 tube stations in the Greater London area.
Google Maps was originally conceived with streets and roads in mind, indicating that the infrastructure was already in place to calculate driving directions. But the United Kingdom is thoroughly dependent upon public transportation, with train journeys often far more direct than driving from city to city by car. To date, using Maps to calculate a route only took advantage of public transportation in Greater London, Google said.
As part of the alliance, travelers will also be able to click through to the thetrainline.com to search for and book tickets. Besides, the website also provides users with full information on walking directions along with a small number of bus timetables for connecting journey, Google said.
Now, visitors who plan to travel outside the capital can enter in their origin and destination address into googlemaps.co.uk and click the public transport option to open up London Underground and train journeys across Britain’s various rail routes. Note that the Maps enhancements covers England, Scotland, and Wales, but not the Republic of Ireland, a separate country.
“Google Maps seeks to deliver an extensive range of significant local information, and public transport station and schedule information is definitely a part of that,” Google’s UK geospatial technologist, Ed Parsons, said in a statement. It is great to be able to make alliance with companies like thetrainline.com and have their schedule information available in Google Maps for the whole of Britain. This means we can reach and help a larger number of people with useful national rail train information, he added.
These improvements also come ahead of the 2012 London Olympics, set to be held this summer. Christopher Rodrigues, the chairman of the UK tourist authority VisitBritain, said the enhanced Google Maps service would be useful during the Olympics.
“We want to motivate visitors to explore the whole of Britain,” Rodrigues said. With the Olympics less than 200 days away Google’s new initiative is exciting news. Millions of visitors plan their itinerary using Google maps and this supplemental information will act as an incentive and inspire them to discover all that is wonderful about our great country, he said.
Nevertheless, directing visitors to a third-party Web site will result in a huge influx of customers. “We are thrilled to be providing train travel information through Google Maps for the first time,” Richard Rowson, product development director for Trainline, said in a statement. “We want to make sure that consumers are always able to consider rail options when making a journey and this innovation will help train travelers nationwide to do that by planning their route more easily. This is a fantastic partnership and demonstrates what two market leading brands working together can achieve.”
Those wishing to utilize the service from a desktop computer need to click on the “get directions” function in Google Maps, enter the locations of departure and arrival and click on the train icon. Whereas, Smartphone users can use GPS to get directions from their current location “to any given destination in Britain,” the companies said.