Hot on the heels of ZoomIn: Google Maps (but not Google Earth) finally has Australian road data!

But alas, their search doesn’t work yet, and the data’s about five years old. Oh well.

In another mildly exciting development, Transperth have effectively announced that the SmartRider trial is officially over and they are now moving to Full Implementation ™ … at a staggered rate.

They have sent out SmartRiders to everyone who had a Seniors Card (my dad got his two days ago) and told them to start using it immediately. They’ve also stopped giving fare reimbursements to us guinea-pig types, and declared in an e-mail that “the level of system reliability continues to improve” and “we are most confident that the rollout will continue with full implementation to all users by the end of this year”.

I’m not sure they can claim that everything works just right — I still occasionally get told “Invalid, Wait for Stop” — but then if they don’t roll out now they probably never will.