While I am passionate about catching buses or trains in preference to hopping in the car, I realise that not everyone shares my passion. One of the reasons that people give for not taking public transport is that they don't know what services are available or when.
The Transperth website has a journey planner that is slightly better than awful. However it is not particularly intuitive, tends to be exceedingly slow, and forget about trying to get up a map that shows your journey.
Julian Ilich (my Days of Change program partner) and I were mulling over this the other day and thinking "wouldn't it be great if you could use Google Maps to do your public transport travel planning for you", and were even wondering about sending an e-mail to Google suggesting this.
You can imagine our delight then when a colleague of Julian's told him that Google Maps have exactly this functionality already.
And it works BRILLIANTLY!
Today we had to travel from our office at 110 William Street to the UWA Club in Crawley. We went to Google Maps and typed "from 110 William Street Perth to Corner Mounts Bay Road and Hackett Drive Crawley" into the search field, pressed enter, and voila, the following screen appeared showing a range of bus options, a map of the route, stop information etc.
This is the last time that I use the Transperth Journey Planner. The Google planner is simply brilliant.
For those of you who aren't familiar with Google maps, simply go to http://maps.google.com/
If you know anyone who catches the bus or train, then send them this article. I suspect that most people wouldn't know about this functionality.
And now you have one less excuse not to use the bus or train!