Google Transit technology fails Halifax Transit
A new piece of technology for Halifax Transit has failed and it's going to take a few weeks to get it back on board.
Google Transit — a way for people riding the bus to get fast and accurate times and other information on bus routes on their smartphones — crashed last week. The program, which is aligned with Google Maps, may be out of commission for two weeks.
Riders understand systems fail, but some are upset with how long it will be down. For people who use the transit system regularly, the glitch is a big problem.
"I use it every day, because I work two jobs," said Kelly Sinclair. "l check it on the go on my phone while I'm at the bus stop to see which one is coming the fastest so I can get to work or I can get home or wherever."
Each day, people in Halifax take more than 100,000 trips on 300 buses and four ferries.
It can be a complicated system for people who need to take more than one bus to get where they are going.
But for some people, including Tina Alcorn, it was made easier with Google Transit.
"There's times when I have to go outside the city via the transit system and I don't know my way around," she said.
"So it's been very helpful in using the GPS application in Google Maps on the transit system to know exactly where I'm going."
Jennifer Stairs, a spokesperson for the Halifax Regional Municipality, said there was an error with the Google Transit feed and the system went down last week.
"Google requires up to two weeks for any of their maps to load properly so it could be as late as next week before we see that service available again," she said Tuesday.
Elyse Bernais, who had started using the new program, said she'd been wondering why it wasn't working.
"You can still click on the little bus symbol there, but no times come up, or no bus schedule at all," she said.
The system was down for several days before the public was notified.
"We apologize for that," said Stairs. "We were under the impression that this was going to be a quick fix so we didn't widely spread the word. Had we known it was going to be as long a delay as it is, I think we would have been more proactive in getting that information out there."
