NYC Part Of Google Pilot Program To Show Transit Crowd Levels

NEW YORK CITY — As more New Yorkers return to more normal patterns of life as the coronavirus pandemic continues, a new Google Maps feature allows residents to track how busy public transportation trains and buses are at any given time.

Google has partnered with more than 10,000 transit agencies in 100 countries and has expanded its transit crowdedness predictor function to give commuters a better idea of what kind of crowds await them on public transportation, the company announced Wednesday.

New York, along with places like Sydney, Australia, are being used as test markets by Google to use artificial intelligence to track how crowded a subway car or bus may be, Google officials said. The information, which is delivered to transit users via Google Maps, offers details down to the transit car level to allow commuters to gauge whether that particular time is the best time to jump on a train or bus or whether they should wait.

New York City, Atlanta, San Francisco, Boston and Washington, DC, rank among the top cities where public transportation is used most, Google officials said. The crowdedness predictor tool shows users which particular cars on a given subway is the least crowded by highlighting that particular train car on the Google Maps app.

On Tuesday, the Metropolitan Transit Authority released ridership numbers since July 10, which indicated that use of public transportation is down anywhere between 35.4 and 57.5 percent from pre-pandemic levels. As many as 2.5 million residents used MTA subways on a given day while as many as 1.2 million commuters relied on city bus service to reach their destinations.

The Long Island Rail Road reported dips as much as 59 percent from 2019 while the Metro-North Rail Road saw as much as a 61 percent drop in ridership from pre-pandemic levels, the MTA announced.