When's The Next Bus Coming? Ask Google

"Comparing Orange County, the city of San Diego or a handful of other California metropolitan areas to the North Coast isn't likely to produce a lengthy list of similarities between the more populous locales and the stretch of state behind the Redwood Curtain.

As of this past spring, however, Humboldt County has an additional parallel with some of its southern counterparts due to the work of an Arcata man who quite literally put Humboldt County on the map."

"A recent endeavor of the Internet giant Google, Google Transit was launched in December 2005. Humboldt County is currently one of 18 regions in the U.S. and the country of Japan to have public transit information available on the site.

Seeing the value in the online resource, [Aaron Antrim] worked to include local information from the Redwood Transit System, Eureka Transit Service and Arcata & Mad River Transit Systems on Google Transit."

"When Antrim learned of the plans for Google Transit, however, he decided that in lieu of attempting to compete with Google, he'd encourage the local transit systems to get on board.

After speaking with the Humboldt Transit Authority, Antrim got his business venture after all. He submitted proposals to HTA and the Arcata & Mad River Transit System. The proposals suggested creating new Web sites for RTS, ETS and AMRTS and making the transit information available on Google Transit.

Antrim was contracted and the sites were launched in June. Each is linked from HTA's home page, www.hta.org. The sites feature trip itinerary planners, maps and schedule grids, as well as schedules downloadable to iPODS, PDAs and mobile devices."