The Transit Navigation android app is a welcome addition, but I wish these types of android apps would work without constant need for data connection (i.e. would cache results and work offline once route downloaded) as nothing is worse than taking an underground train and losing all route information due to loss of signal. On a side-note "Pubtran London" is another good (and free) android app for London travel which also takes into account route/line closures and can also find National Rail train times/route info (for entire UK) from within same tool.
Google Maps has an experimental feature for downloading map information. I don't think it currently includes transit yet but I'm sure it will in the future.
Android-wise, I've been using Pubtran London. The new Transit Navigation feature in Google Maps for Android, goes a long way to making Pubtran redundant. Will be interesting to see how the Pubtran author raises his game in response.
Looks very nice, but doesn't take into account tube status. This is especially important on weekends where lots of closures occur due to engineering works. Hopefully it will soon, otherwise the TfL site is the still the best bet if you already have an idea of where you're going and just want to take a quick look to see if anything will affect your journey.
I could be wrong, but I suspect the reason Londoners think that is just because they use it so regularly. If you're catching 2+ TFL tubes a day, and national services maybe a few times a year, maybe even a couple of times a week, if they both have pretty similar success rates then TFL will feel much worse, because it will get so many more bad memories.
I probably go to London at least ten times a month (either for a day or just for an evening), and have slightly more network rail trips a month (all my trips to london are an hour away by train), and in my experience I have much more trust for TFL.
This sort of perception is what makes one think that train services in other countries are always better than in your own backyard. The truth is that, in Europe, the average level of railway service is more or less the same everywhere these days; the exception is recent high-speed technology, which is only available in a handful of countries ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe ).
This is great - I rarely use buses because it's just too much of a headache trying to determine how far I need to walk to get one, when the next one is, and how far I need to walk at the other end - then trying to compare mutliple options against those criteria! In central London I just grab the Tube because it's an easier decision - the visual element of this makes buses far easier to assess as an option.
It's worth investing the time to familiarize yourself with London's bus network. I'm a big fan of the "spider maps" they introduced a few years ago. They're kind of like mini tube-style maps for each neighbourhood:
How is this only just happening? I live in Adelaide, Australia (1.2 million approx) with some of the worst public transport I've experienced in the developed world and we've had Google Maps with public transport integration for years.
Incidentally, there was a cool iPhone app called TubeMap that made travelling on the tube a breeze when I was there last which included service downtimes which are apparently quite common, worked fine offline and was pretty fully featured in all ways you could want. However, the Tube is only a small part of the public transport for greater London.
That's the easy and somewhat circular answer. I'd be curious to know what rationale the service had for not integrating with Google Maps or vice versa. Cost is the only legitimate one that comes to mind - I can't imagine concerns about open data were a massive issue given that third parties have been using and providing a subset of the same data for some time.
Google didn't want more transit partners for a long time: the sign-up page just said "check back later".
I think they are very concerned that the data feed will be bad or unreliable, and that they will be providing bad directions. I know in NYC, the schedule and such for subways is generally simple, but has crazy exception rules every weekend for maintenance.
Great to see but it didn't work that great for the couple of searches I tried. For London Bridge to Marylebone it confused London Bridge with Tower Bridge, much like Robert McCulloch ;)
I wouldn't be too hard on them - any sentient AI would probably make the same mistake on a first pass given how widespread the confusion is. For instance do a Google Image search on London Bridge.
It was a little quirky (the bus arrival times seemed to be off a bit), but overall quite nice. It includes all forms of transport (bus, tube, DLR, ferry, and even Boris's bikes), lets your limit your travel options to just certain types (e.g., "I only want to see bus routes right now"), and has nice heuristics like whether you prefer to walk, how fast a walker you are, etc.
I used it a few times here in São Paulo / Brazil to catch a bus and it worked like a charm, but I would love some offline caching of routes since the 3G sinal here is terrible and expensive.
