Google Ride Finder finds out where your taxi or shuttle is - a communters best friend

Thanks to Lockergnome for discovering this gem

"Here’s a new entry from the Google Labs (You might want to call it ‘Google Playground,’ since this is where new Google tools show up first). This new tool is called Google Ride Finder and it could turn out to be the harried commuter’s best friend.

The Google Ride Finder does just one thing: it finds out where your taxi or shuttle is. That can be a lifesaver as you struggle to make the 5:56 home from work at the end of a long day. It gives you a fighting chance to see if that ride you're counting on is stuck in traffic.

It's only available for the large urban hubs of 13 cities at the moment and it offers far from universal coverage of every taxi or shuttle. <snip> The site does offer a zoomable map of the area, a button to refresh vehicle locations, and links to the home page of each company whose vehicles are tracked."