Mapquest Introduces Transit, Walking Directions

Mapquest has introduced public transit and walking directions. It has had walking directions on mobile for awhile. The transit directions are limited right now to rail (including subway) and in only a few cities:

Rail Transit Directions are now available in six major metro areas (NYC, Chicago, D.C., San Fran, Boston and Philly) all of which have large subway, elevated and/or commuter rail networks. Rail transit is integrated with walking directions, allowing travelers in these cities to route between towns, addresses, points of interest, or specific transit stations.

Google has had transit and walking directions for some time and Bing added public transit routing and directions in Q3 of last year.

The Mapquest public transit data is provided by Urban Mapping. CEO Ian White says that the Mapquest implementation is limited now but should become more extensive. He says that the company’s data exceed what Google offers in terms of “accuracy and refinement.”

Mapquest has made a big push over the past six months with a new look and feel a broad relationship with OpenStreetMap and other product moves. The company claims 44 million users and still has greater brand recognition for its maps (in terms of search queries) than Google, despite Google’s greater traffic.

Mapquest is part of the new group at AOL being run by Arianna Huffington after AOL’s acquisition of the HuffingtonPost last week.