Looks like more good news for those of us who think that transit agencies should adopt prevailing technologies as a way of disseminating information and growing ridership (a large group, I imagine) as both NJ Transit and the NY MTA are apparently working with Google Transit.
While we’re not anxious to turn this into the Google Transit blog, this article from Bloomberg discusses the economic incentive that Google has for adding transit to its mapping service:
Google, based in Mountain View, California, introduced its online guides in 2005. They are designed to show transit users how to navigate systems, and to boost Google’s revenue from selling ads to restaurants, hotels and other local businesses.
U.S. companies spent about $922 million last year to place ads alongside local searches and maps, according to Kelsey Group Inc., a market research firm in Princeton, New Jersey. That will almost triple to $2.61 billion by 2011, the researcher says.
[...]
Google probably got about $500 million in sales last year from local ads, or about 8 percent of its U.S. revenue of $6 billion, said Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence in San Francisco.
Google doesn’t disclose its local ad revenue, and Christoph Oehler, product manager for maps and transit, declined to say whether the company is negotiating with the New York and New Jersey agencies.
New Jersey Transit plans to share maps and schedules with Google as part of a pilot program to post more information about the system on the Web, Redeker said. MTA spokesman Jeremy Soffin confirmed the New York agency is also working with Google Transit. He declined to give specifics.
So what have we learned this month? Google makes money off of the ad revenue from linking businesses with transit through maps and transit agencies increase ridership (and revenues) from having their transit linked with businesses.
Sounds like a win-win. What is everyone waiting for?
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