In what is probably the largest celebration for Google Transit since their initial launch, the team announced support for the New York today. I know from the stories Chris tells me just how difficult it was to get the largest transit agency in the country on board with their program.

The online world has taken notice and Chris was called out in a New York Times article. With the impending arrival of his son next Monday, Chris couldn’t travel to New York to partake in the celebration. Instead he posted the official announcement to the Google blog.

Thinking about the magnitude of today’s launch, I can’t help but think about how far we’ve come towards reaching our goal. It’s been nearly two years to the day since I posted about the expansion of the Google Transit trip planner (we added five more cities to our initial single-city launch in Portland, Oregon). And in that post I included some statistics about how many people lived in a city covered by our product. At the time, our coverage was 6 U.S. cities. Now we cover more than 170 cities and countries across the globe, including about 70 cities in North America and 81 in China, plus cities in Europe and Australia and national coverage of Japan, Switzerland and Austria. And the number of people served annually by agencies was at about 6 million. Now it’s hard to count precisely, but the number is at least at several hundred million (wow!).

Posted by Chris Harrelson, Tech Lead & Creator of Google Transit

In New York, Google and the MTA announced the partnership via a splashy event in Grand Central Station.

You can watch some video coverage by local NYC news.