Google May Provide Online Guides for MTA, NJ Transit
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Google Inc. provides online transit guides for more than a dozen American cities including Dallas and San Diego. Now it may take on the biggest.
New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and New Jersey Transit, which together carry more than 9 million people a day, are working with the company to give users one place to go for maps, schedules, and trip planners.
“We are always looking for ways to incorporate technology in what we do,” the assistant executive director of New Jersey Transit, Jim Redeker, said in a telephone interview. Google has “good experience at making this work.”
Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., 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.
American 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, N.J. That will almost triple to $2.61 billion by 2011, the researcher said.
Google probably got about $500 million in sales last year from local ads, or about 8% of its American revenue of $6 billion, said Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence in San Francisco.
A product manager for maps and transit, Christoph Oehler, declined to say whether the company is negotiating with the New York and New Jersey agencies.
