Picture by AndyLeungHK on Pixabay

[This is one of a series of articles originally published on Local Guides Connect]

Did you ever try to add a bus stop to Google Maps? Or suggest an edit to an existing train station? If so, here is my prediction for what happened to your submission: it was ‘Pending’ for a while, and then later on was labeled ‘Not applied’. Correct, isn’t it? Well, in fact that wasn’t very hard to predict, as local guides are simply not allowed to make changes to anything related to public transportation. All of that is part of the transit layer, which is not open to editing for local guides.

This might sound weird at first, but there is a very good reason for it: Google is working together very closely with the companies and organizations that offer public transportation to make sure that not only the bus stops and train stations are mapped properly, but also a lot of additional – and extremely useful – information is added to Google Maps. If you have not done this before, you should definitely open the information for a train station or a bus stop on Maps: the buses or trains serviced there are shown in full detail, starting from the next one that will arrive counting from the time you consult the info. And if you then click on one of the lines shown there, you get the full detail of that line (at which hour is it stopping at which place). Especially for international travelers this is very convenient, as they don’t have to install the local app for each country/region they are traveling to in order to get access to information with this level of detail.

So: the best practice if you come across an error that is related to public transportation, is not wasting your time by suggesting an edit (there’s plenty of other errors waiting to be corrected), but use the Send Feedback function (accessible via the main menu – the 3 horizontal lines in the top left corner). Should you come across a public transportation point of interest that is not yet shown on Google Maps, you should therefore not try to add it yourself, but rather find out which local authority or organization is responsible for it and suggest to them to get in touch with Google (https://maps.google.com/landing/transit).

The original article can be found here

Disclaimer: the practices described here as best practice are my personal interpretation, and I don’t claim any level of official endorsement.