A post on the LatLong Blog announced this afternoon, "[Y]ou can now see New York’s subway lines drawn out directly on Google Maps as part of the transit layer.  To turn it on, just point Google Maps to somewhere in New York, click on the ‘More…’ button at top-right, and select ‘Transit.’"

Then, "When you click on any station name, a bubble pops up with the names of the line that service the station, and all the other lines on the screen fade out."

And the transit layer is accessible through Google Maps for BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian S60, by the way, so people should be able to take advantage of it while they’re on the go.

Lots of New York tourists – and/or GE execs who have been barred from using company cars – are likely to wind up being quite grateful for this offering.

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In a post on the LatLong Blog, Raphael Leiteritz wrote, "Recently we launched full schedules for Transit . . . in Calgary, Hamilton, Edmonton, and York Region in Canada; East Midlands (UK); Houston (TX); 21 agencies in the state of Virginia, as well as a substantial data set in China, connecting all provinces with 3100 train lines, covering about 2700 stations and all major cities."

 Google Transit

Plus, "We’re adding to the 50+ cities we launched at the beginning of this year.  New cities include: Adelaide, Atlanta, Bonn, Calgary, Davis, California, Hamilton, Canada, Pilsen, Sacramento, Torino, Toronto York region, and we’ve launched updates for Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria."

This represents an obvious win for people who live in the listed areas and plan their trips in advance.  Folks who are visiting (or are just more spur-of-the-moment types) are also in luck since all of the information should be accessible by mobile devices.

Here’s hoping not too many people need the transit data, though.  Car manufacturers, at least, would certainly be happier to see everyone using plain old Google Maps.

The layer should prove helpful when users are looking for ways to get to specific locations. "If you want to book a hotel or make a restaurant reservation you can switch on the Transit Layer and look for the public transport line nearest to the location," explains Raphael Leiteritz. "If you want to travel from A to B you can quickly familiarize yourself with the public transport network and find out which lines to use and where to change."

"The Transit Layer is a part of Google Transit," continues Leiteritz. "Whereas the main Google Transit product has the goal to provide full schedule information and routing, the objective of the Transit Layer is to overlay lines visually on Google Maps. Think of a virtual metro map on top of Google Maps — even when we don’t have itinerary planning available, we want you to be able to see public transit options that are available. Our goal is to be able to offer transit information as an alternative to driving directions wherever possible."

Cities include: Belo Horizonte, Berlin, Bordeaux, Brasilia, Cairo, Capetown, Caracas, Chicago, Copenhagen, Dallas, Dortmund, Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Ekaterinburg, Essen, Frankfurt, Genoa, Guadalajara, Hamburg, Helsinki, Johannesburg, Kazan, Köln, Lille, Lisbon, London, Lyon, Madrid, Marseille, Medellin, Mexico City, Melbourne, Monterrey, Montreal, Munich, Naples, Nizhniy Novgorod, Oslo, Paris, Perth, Portland, Porto, Porto Alegre, Prague, Pretoria, Recife, Rennes, Rio de Janeiro, Samara, San Francisco, Santiago, Sao Paulo, Seattle, Strasbourg, Toulouse, Tunis, Vienna, and Warsaw. I would assume that more will follow.

 Transit Info From Google Maps For Mobile

"This version (2.2) allows you to get transit directions in all the same places as the web version of Google Maps, including Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Vancouver, and over 40 other cities in North America," announced Joe Hughes on the Google Mobile Blog.

Then Hughes revealed some upgrades by hinting at an interesting scenario.  Happen to be trashed in an unknown part of town?  Use what Josh Lowensohn dubbed the "drunk button."

"[Y]ou can find the last transit trips of the day (to figure out how late you can stay at the party) and more easily browse through earlier or later trips," Hughes stated.  "The My Location feature, available on most phones, also makes it easier to set the start point of your journey." 

It’s nice of Google to look after the inebriated, eh?  Anyway, BlackBerrys and other Java-based phones are Google’s target devices for now, but the company is working on increasing the transit upgrade’s availability.  Transit info for more cities should become part of the system over time, as well.

 Google Transit Meets Chicago

Actually, that’s an understatement.  We’ve seen less written when news affected entire countries; this city’s inhabitants must take their public transportation seriously.  A full 17 comments have accumulated so far on Chicagoist, and local papers including the Chicago Tribune have covered the update.  On to the Google LatLong Blog, then, where Ron Huberman explained its implications.

"As the second-largest transit agency in the United States, the CTA serves an average of 1.6 million riders per weekday and nearly 500 million rides a year, so being able to provide this new service to our vast ridership and all of the 45 million tourists who visit this great city every year is a great stride in promoting the use and convenience of public transportation," he wrote.

A full eight rail lines and 154 bus routes have been wrapped into Google Transit.  Anyone not familiar with the service (which is connected to Google Maps) can get up to speed by watching this handy video.  And although SES Chicago is still eight months away, we’d encourage everyone to keep this development in mind when the conference rolls around.

The business listings came in a couple of European clusters – Finland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden in the north, and Austria and Switzerland in a more central area.  These presumably represent an organized and significant step on the path to Google’s “total information” plan.

Roads, on the other hand, appeared on rather random and distant ends of the earth – Poland and South Africa are about 6,000 miles apart and on opposite sides of the equator.  It seems that Google might have tackled a big job with the business listings, and a rather easier one in this case.

The Google Transit update should amount to yet another far-reaching revision, however.  “Our Transit layer has also been enhanced with new colors and icons,” announced Wei Luo on the Google LatLong Blog.  Google Transit is available for parts of Japan, Canada, Italy, Switzerland, the UK, and the US.

Finally, Luo’s post was called “December Updates in Google Earth,” so while we can’t rule it out, it might be best not to expect anything else prior to January.