Amtrak + Google. A good start.
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- August
- 10
Five Amtrak routes are now included in Google Transit searches. So you can use the Google site to find your way, say, from New York City to Albany, if you can’t figure out how to get to directly to the Amtrak site. (www.amtrak.com.)
(Oddly, though, I was unable to find a public transit route from Yonkers to Albany, even though Yonkers is on Amtrak’s Empire line, one of the five now linked to Google.)
Still, it’s a start. The nationwide railroad says it plans to eventually have all of its routes available on the Google site.
Meanwhile, I gave the Google site a test run and found some oddities. I tried to public transit directions from New Rochelle to Sao Paolo, Brazil and it told me the search “appears to be outside our current coverage area.”
So I tried New Rochelle to Seattle’s Space Needle and got the same response.
But then I re-ran that last search looking for walking directions instead of transit, and lo and behold, it showed me the way. A very, very long way. See, you start walking north on North Avenue, then turn right on Wilmot. After that…Well, this goes on for a while. The cross-country trek on foot comes in 828 steps, some of them a few hundred feet, some of them a number of miles.
It takes an estimated 37 days and 20 hours.
You can’t walk across the Tappan Zee Bridge, so the route takes you farther north, across the Bear Mountain Bridge. Then west across New York, into Canada at Niagara Falls, then back into the United States at Michigan.
You get the idea.
Anyway, that’s a bit of a tangent.
If you’re not keen on walking cross-country, but want public transit instructions, keep an eye on the Google Transit site. If all the Amtrak routes are added in, it will become a lot more comprehensive.
This entry was posted
on Monday, August 10th, 2009 at 9:46 am by Ken Valenti.
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google will also tell you to swim from boston to England