My friend and I were talking today about how useful it would be to have a comprehensive route view for a given region. While having icons indicating the various transit stops is helpful, having line paths that indicate entire route would be even more helpful. By knowing the path of routes, I am able to discover new places I can go on via transit and even discover better ways of getting places.

To implement this, I envision that there would be a "Transit" toggle button in participating cities, just as there is for Traffic and Street View. Once this button is clicked, a new layer would be overlaid which would show the path of every transit route in the current view. Assigning colors to each route would help distinguish between route paths. Hovering over a line would provide a tooltip for the routes that are being pointed at. Upon clicking on one of the routes, the others would fade so that the clicked route would stand out and be more easily identifiable. If multiple routes are overlapping each other, a balloon could appear which would then allow you select the route. Clicking another route path would also cause it to be highlighted alongside of the previously clicked route. This way the two can be examined side-by-side. Re-clicking a selected route would make it fade fade away like the other route paths.

A route's path may also be seen by clicking a route number which appears in the suggested trips or in the transit stop detail balloon which appears after clicking a transit stop icon. Clicking one of these routes automatically selects the "Transit" toggle and highlights the desired route. The other routes in the suggested trips may then also be selected so that the entire routes of all the trip connections may be compared.

Lines that demarcate the fare zones would also be helpful.

I love Google Transit and think that these improvements would make it