GOOG Alphabet Inc

By Paul Berger 

If you knew your regular, jam-packed commuter train is usually followed by another one with empty seats, would you leave home 15 minutes later?

It is a question that Google Maps will hope to help answer with a new rollout Thursday: a transit feature that predicts crowdedness levels across mass transit in more than 200 cities, about one-quarter of them in the U.S. The feature sweeps up large cities from Los Angeles to New York as well as smaller ones such as Champaign, Ill., and New Haven, Conn.

With the new feature, when a rider searches for directions in Google Maps, the recommended routes will include predictions of how crowded a particular bus, train, streetcar or ferry will be.

Taylah Hasaballah, a Google product manager in Sydney, Australia, who oversees the project, said that in user research crowdedness is one of the top concerns for Google Maps users when making journey decisions.

"This feature is aimed at helping those users to make better decisions and trade-offs about how they would like to move around their city," Ms. Hasaballah said.

The predictions are based on crowdsourced information from millions of riders world-wide, covering cities from Leeds, England, to Pune, India.

Beginning in October 2018, Google asked certain users who recently looked up directions or completed a trip to rate their journeys. Riders were given four options: many empty seats; few empty seats; standing room only; or cramped standing room only.

Google used the data it collected since October to build its model of crowdedness across transit. It will continue asking the question going forward to keep its data up-to-date.

Ms. Hasaballah said that figuring out how to collect and aggregate the information wasn't simple, especially because crowdedness is subjective. The ratings are user-generated, she said, so each system's rankings are tailored to that region's idea of what is considered empty or cramped.

Google has tested its predictions and found its accuracy is fairly high, Ms. Hasaballah said.

A spokeswoman for Google, which is owned by Alphabet Inc., said the crowdedness indicator is based on past performance, so it works best when trains and buses run to schedule. The company sees the indicator as a guide similar to Google Maps' "popular times" feature, which tells people how busy bars, restaurants and other venues are at different hours of the day.

Madeleine Koestner, a consultant who commutes to New York City from New Jersey, said Google's new service is perfect for her. Ms. Koestner, who is 31, said she already takes slower subway lines when she knows that a faster train on another line will be packed.

But Julia Strapp, a lighting designer from Queens, N.Y., said she wouldn't find the function useful. She just squeezes onto the first subway train that comes because she has no choice. "If it's crowded, it means it's rush hour," she said.

Chris Stocking, a spokesman for Clevelanders for Public Transit, said riders in his city are more concerned about rising fares and service cuts than they are about crowdedness. "We just want a bus that comes frequently, that gets us where we need to go in an affordable way," Mr. Stocking said.

Google will also release a new map feature Thursday showing estimated bus journey times.

Many U.S. transit agencies already provide real-time bus travel feeds to Google. But for those that don't, in cities such as Atlanta, Google will predict travel times.

The Google spokeswoman said the company generates the estimates by combining route information, such as the number of bus stops and bus lanes, with live traffic conditions and anonymized data from users with location services turned on.

Write to Paul Berger at Paul.Berger@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 27, 2019 12:14 ET (16:14 GMT)

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