Need to know the city bus route in Fredericton? Check Google.
fredericton, moncton, wifi Add commentsI’m not a transit user anymore but I can see the value in this, especially in Fredericton. Visitors, new students and new residents especially will find it easier to reach their destination.
Fredericton Transit has joined with Google to offer a mapping service that allows transit riders to not only map out their routes, but to get walking route suggestions and projected durations of their trips at different times in the day.
It would come in handy for anyone who has tried to make sense of some of the transit routes where if you need to go to one side of the North Side to another area of the North Side by crossing to the SOUTH side of the river.
(Click for larger image)
Fredericton Transit
NB has made some good progress with the transit systems and the use of the web as Moncton had wifi implemented on their transit not that long ago.
December 5th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
Interesting. I think it’s good that people are investigating these technologies. However, having tried planning a route from home to work:
1. Google maps (actually the NavTeq data they use) is hopelessly inaccurate and out of date. For some reason, it insists that I live on the other side of Fredericton from where I think I live. And that’s if I give it a six digit postcode. If I give it a street address it asks me if I meant the same street and number in places such as New York, Florida, California etc (I don’t think Fredericton Transit goes there yet). The NavTeq data for my 15 year old subdivision is so hopeless it does not name streets and it thinks that a cart track which was here before the subdivision, and which is now inaccessible to vehicles and is now totally overgrown, is as much a road as the actual roads. Sad…. (Partly Canada is to blame as maps in this country can easily be decades out of date).
2. I don’t think I am going to travel for 1hr 15min, using 3 buses, when I could drive or taxi it in less than 15. And that’s only 1hr 15min because the system only knows about the street at the edge of the subdivision - to get to where I live would be another 15 minutes walk making it 1hr 30min.
3. And it highlights how few bus routes there are, and how infrequently they run. It really illustrates that the way we live in much of this country runs counter to any kind of viable transit system.
4. Any normal transit planning tool tells you the departure and arrival times for each leg.
Still, I think it is excellent that the City folks are on top of the new technologies. Well done!
December 7th, 2007 at 10:32 am
Hmm, I didn’t think that Google maps was that out of date. Then again, I haven’t tried to do the bus routes.
I was surprised to see that they had recent satellite images available for Fredericton plus they do have the new highway shown. Maybe the provincial government provided that data while city info is lagging behind?
December 7th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Fredericton Bus Route on Google…
Fredericton Transit has added bus schedule information to google maps. So you can easily get bus directions in Freddy Beach from Google. It\’s even possible to see the bus route via satellite image. Sometimes it even shows the cost savings from taki…