[nopassrecover]

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.

[avar]

Because bureaucracies are slow, and it's taken this time for London to release up-to-date and machine readable data.

[nopassrecover]

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.

[smackfu]

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.