Hey.
I'm Donald Bell for CNET.com.
I'm here in Las Vegas for CES.
I've got no car.
I don't have a lot of cash to spend on taxis and take me where I wanna go.
Fortunately, if you got smart phone and flexible schedule, you can pretty easily plan a trip using public transportation.
Now, the best out for that is Google Maps.
It really has the best job of tying
together all your different public transportation options and works in any city anywhere in the world.
So, I'm gonna open the app for Google maps right here.
All right.
So, here it is showing my current location, now, to hit directions, I'm gonna hit the direction with button up here at the top.
Now, by default, it's going to show me the direction as if I was driving by a car but I'm not.
I'm stuck out here without a car.
So, I'm gonna move this over to public transportation, the icon in the middle.
If I feel really adventurous, I could hit the icon
for walking but no one walks in Las Vegas.
So, let's go back to public transportation.
Now, the phone is detecting my current location as the starting point, that's great.
Then it's asking me to choose my destination and I click done.
So I can search for any destination I want, but I've got my favorite bar here, good British pub, I'm gonna head there.
So, now I've got a few different options.
I have to go by bus or I've got the second option in here, it looks like this one involves monorail.
I'm gonna click on that, monorail sounds like fun.
Forty-minute trip,
and I get an overview map of exactly where I'm going and how long it's going to take me and I can pull that up and I can see an overview of all the different steps in bold metric.
I can also pull it down to hide it.
Now, to dig a little deeper, I could hit the options button here and I can get a different departure time.
If I wanted to leave at a different time, I could-- just like that I wanna go specifically by bus or subway or see the row that has a fewest amount of transfers, dial that all
in, hit the back button and get a different lineup here.
All right, now, before I leave, one thing I should make sure to do, is make sure I don't get stranded.
I wanna be able to get back.
So, let's reverse the trip by hitting the reverse arrows over here.
So I'm coming from the pub back to my current location.
I also wanna make sure that trains and monorail will be running at the time I leave so I'm gonna hit the options button and make sure that my, you know, get a couple of hours in for drinking, that I'll probably be leaving let's say around, you know, 8:45, why
not?
Hit back.
So these are gonna be my options in getting back.
Looks like I'm in good shape.
Two dollars gets me back to my hotel.
All right.
So, that's my best advice on how to use your smart phone and Google Maps to plan a trip using public transportation.
More How Tos like this, visit howto.cnet.com.
You can also find me on Twitter.
I'm Donald Bell, thanks for watching.
