Last weekend, Chris and Sara came over for an early birthday celebration for Hanna.  Today, May 15th, she turns two!!

Chris and I got talking about tech and the new transit icons that have been incorporated onto Google Maps.  Chris, as a steward for Google Transit, participated in and championed for the addition of transit onto the core mapping product.  He mentioned that a pretty involved discussion between Google designers was going ’round about the proper icon for transit.  It turns out that by looking through related reference material such as maps and the Lonely Planetbooks, the letter “M” (for Metro) is the most common.  Some argued that it should be a non-latin character, perhaps a depiction of a train, but the M won out as the default icon.  For those cities that have a very iconic brand for their transit, such as the London Underground, Google opted to display that icon instead.  Here’s a quick sampling of some major cities.

San Francisco uses the default icon and displays the name of the station

Paris names their transit the “Metro” and as such their own icon is used

New York uses the default icon for the subway but also incorporates a pictorial icon for PATH

London uses the historic underground icon on the map

Berlincalls it’s transit the U-Bahn and is depicted with a “U” icon

Barcelona offers a twist on the metro “M” icon

Sydney shows the train lines connected via simple dots

Tokyogoes to the bother of outlining each station with a polygon.  The large pink blob below is the station

 Two side notes for Google maps:

1. When did they incorporate the transparent 3D maps?  I saw this when zoomed all the way in for SF  and for NYC.  Very cool stuff.
2. Chris brought to my attention the availability of schedule data from BART.  The named the service “Open Schedules” and are offering the data feed in the GTFS (Google Transit Feed Specification).  Now you can create your own app to display BART schedules.