Coming soon to NYC’s Grand Central Station: the world’s largest Apple Store. Apple has signed a 10-year deal with the Metropolitan Transit Authority to lease a 23,000-square foot space in Grand Central. The New York Post reports that the MTA believes the deal will “significantly increase” their revenues. The store will also significantly increase traffic in Grand Central Station during Apple’s product release events. NYC commuters will have to wait and see whether the new Apple Store affects their travels.

The Metropolitan Transit Authority, New York’s transportation department, is hosting an app-designing challenge. The MTA App Quest is looking for “new apps that improve the transit experience of its 8.5 million daily riders.” There will be $15,000 in prizes for the winning apps.

For those of you that have visited or live in New York City, you know that getting around just ain’t easy.  To get around the city you can use water taxis, regular taxis, subways, buses, cars, bikes, segways, regional rail, or just walking everywhere.  Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has just introduced a new way to make transportation planning easier in New York.  They have taken the route and schedule information of the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), the largest public transportation agency in the U.S. and have integrated them into Google Maps. 

The route and schedules belong to the regional rails, buses, and subways themselves.  This includes the Long Island Rail Road, the Long Island Bus, Metro-North Railroad, and the MTA Bus Company.  This project is a part of Google Transit.  Google Transit plays a huge role in energy conservation.  The number of cities that Google Transit provides the routes and guides for is astonishing.  They even have the routes and guides to several whole countries like Switzerland, Japan, and Austria. 

“Thinking about the magnitude of today’s launch, I can’t help but think about how far we’ve come towards reaching our goal. It’s been nearly two years to the day since I posted about the expansion of the Google Transit trip planner (we added five more cities to our initial single-city launch in Portland, Oregon). And in that post I included some statistics about how many people lived in a city covered by our product. At the time, our coverage was 6 U.S. cities,” stated Chris Harrelson, Tech Lead & Creator of Google Transit.  “Now we cover more than 170 cities and countries across the globe, including about 70 cities in North America and 81 in China, plus cities in Europe and Australia and national coverage of Japan, Switzerland and Austria. And the number of people served annually by agencies was at about 6 million. Now it’s hard to count precisely, but the number is at least at several hundred million (wow!).”

The route guide for NYC on Google Maps is available at: http://maps.google.com/nyc.  Below is a demo of how to use Google Transit for New York City: