I just read on the C|Net Download Blog that:

“…As with the online version, Google’s Transit works in 250 cities.”

The blog post is describing how the Android OS now supports voice as well as transit instructions.  Now, fortunately or unfortunately, the editor of this blog was in San Francisco, where all features of Google’s Maps & Earth service are working at their best.  However, as an owner of an iPhone, I am many times at the mercy of the massive holes that unfortunately still remain in this service.  Now, if Google would specifically say that they don’t offer Google Transit in my area (the DC Metro area) then I would just be pleasantly surprised when data starts to populate in my phone regarding bus stops and metro stops.

But, when just looking up how to get from where I was in Arlington to Downtown DC, I ran into this:

The location where I was, was fairly close to a Metro rail station.  So, I punched in directions on how to get to the Metro station, and thence to downtown.

Bogus Directions from Google Transit

Bogus Directions from Google Transit

The directions I got back clearly show that only the BUS is loaded into Google Transit’s coverage of the DC Metro area, and not the train.  This is despte the fact that the train is marked perfectly in Google Earth, but somehow did not make it into the Google Maps / Google Transit data space.

So, from Arlington, it has me first walk to the Metro station.  Then, it has me take a GWU Shuttle bus about an hour away from DC to Ashburn, VA, to the George Washington Ashburn campus, and then hop on another bus all the way back in to DC, and then to walk from George Washington University to my final destination in town (about 40 mins walking).

If the Metro was added, it would have simply told me to hop on the train and take it downtown, change to the Red Line, and then be 2 doors down from my destination.

Now, I can’t knock them too hard — as they do have a phenomenal service that has grown in leaps and bounds over the past year.  But when you offer transit mapping to millions of handheld users, you have now exposed the data (or lack thereof) to people to really need it and could otherwise end up stranded when they start relying on their handheld device to tell them where to go.

Probably a good solution on this would be to simply not mark Google Transit service as being available, until such a time when all of the data is loaded & tested — as opposed to stat-pushing it so that it appears that “250 cities are covered” whereas the travel instructions in the 3rd-biggest metro area in the USA are not even remotely usable.