James has been at Google since 2017, moving from Cloud to Search in 2021. An alumni of economics and management at Cornell University, he founded WikiSpaces in 2004 and grew monthly visitors to 50 million before 2014 when it was acquired by TES. James was the Global Director of Marketplace at TES until joining Google.
Google supports sustainable user decisions
Despite growing travel demands post-Covid, to reach the global sustainability goals and reduce global warming the transport sector needs to reduce emissions by around a quarter by 2030.
The updates to Google Search and Google Maps are designed to encourage users looking for travel information to consider the environmental impact of their decisions.
In Maps, this comes in the form of a new feature that suggests public transport or walking options where travel times are comparable to driving routes. In Search, a new expanded feature supports users finding information on buses and long distance train routes.
Last year, a new sustainable Search feature gave users looking for flight information about train routes, which is now being rolled out to Google Flights too. The Travel Impact Model (TIM), a methodology published by Google and created by James in 2022 for predicting per-passenger flight emissions, filters results in Google Flights by lower-emitting options – this has been made more accessible in the update.