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ChineseDumping Haterade on 511 schedules
[tags]sfist, laist, bay area, 511[/tags]
LAist mentioned its sister-city web site, SFist, highlighting why it hates the Bay Area’s 511.org traffic and transit portal.
Matt Baume of SFist says:
Here’s the problem, Five-eleven: you’re just not operating with your users in mind. You’ve thrown all kinds of seemingly random, disconnected data up on the website, with no consideration for how users might actually want to use it. … We could probably locate [bus stops] with some hunting around on Google maps, but come on, Five-eleven, you don’t want us to have to do that, do you? It’ll just make us hate you even more.
Rightly so. The programmers of 511 took over a home-made effort by a couple of college students, but forgot what made it great.
But how exactly is this relevant to Southern California? The Southern California Transit Information Page, now inactive but legend still living on the Wayback Machine, was built with the letter and spirit of the Bay Area Transit Information Page in mind.
What made the TIPs great? Or, at least better than 511?
Note the spartan, early-generation web interface. The graphics are simple and small. There was a text list of major agencies, then a longer list of smaller agencies, and further down, secondary providers such as intercity buses and ferries.
Both followed the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Transit may be slow and inconvenient, but transportation information does not have to be. The simplicity of use made it easy to find the information riders need. The text reproduced schedules in a plain fixed-width font that made it useful to be copied and saved in programs. It was also built without having to rely on PDFs. Transit agencies that still scan schedules and save them as Acrobat files have lazy, inept web monkeys.
Today’s 511, which basically absorbed BATIP, has a list of pop-down menus. For transit schedules, another window pops up offering several options. One is for schedules, another is for popular destinations, and so on. Clicking on the schedules menu produces a drop-down menu, with a long list piling together major agencies with smaller ones. It’s quite a complicated maze, whereas on the TIPs all the same information was on the front page.
Skip navigation is available to directly navigate users to the page they want, but the overall site navigation is still a chore. And, as Baume said, it makes bringing together the 511 modules difficult.
The TIPs provided a useful service, by having schedules for many agencies in a one-stop shop and keeping everything simple and easy-to-find. When 511 became professionalized, it kept the first aspect but forgot about the second. This is often a conceit of designers of all fields: forgetting where design becomes overdesigned.
Sometimes, as the TIPs illustrated, the best solution comes from users who figure out what they need and how to present it.
Disclosure: I entered most of the schedules for SoCalTIP. So if I heap too much praise on the TIPs, it’s because I am right. Oh yeah, and because I worked on the site.
Discussion
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Please keep discussions civil: exercise Troll Controll.
On the other hand, there’s two reasons the TIPs failed, and that was lack of agtency support to get schedules in a machine readable format, and later, agencies putting their schedules in PDF, eliminating the need for the TIPs in the first place. While PDF is not as accessible as text only, it is easily printable, which is what the majority of users really want in the first place. Text only had a usefulness in 1999 where many folks were still using lynx, but since 2000, when even screen readers are now compatible with modern web sites and PDF, it has lost much of its usefulness.
On the other hand, TIPs could do what no other transit agency dares: provide schedules in one place.
You’d think in Southern California of all places, it’s wasteful to maintain over 60 different information lines and sources, and all agencies would at least agree to have a centralized call center.
Maybe it’s the culture of stubbornness in transit agencies that dates back to the streetcar days, but each information center can vouch for its own information only.
That’s useless in Southern California and the Bay Area. Transit agencies will generally be good about getting their information, but don’t want to be on the hook for other properties’ schedules being right.
TIPs filled this niche. I did some networking with agencies, and many were willing and some did provide scheduling information. The demise of SoCalTIP was because of a complicated server-side script that prevented schedules from being updated quickly. The backlog just became too much.
In the case of BATIP, the students who started the site got enough cooperation from the agencies that the agencies would input the schedules for them. Most of the Bay Area agencies were way behind the curve in their web presence, especially sad considering the region was pretty much the Fertile Crescent of the techonomy.
But I digress.
Once the agencies figured out they had a collective portal and doing most of the work, they pretty much pushed the students out of the picture and professionalized it. That’s what led to the modern 511.
Today’s interface was better than the first incarnation, but the original BATIP still beats anything the MTC brain trust could design.
Meanwhile, Southern California is still treating the Web as new technology. About the only thing Metro does well with its web site is to own the metro.net domain.
Yet Metro charitably provides “other carrier” links, making the users do their own legwork.
And yes, 1-800-COMMUTE provides regional information. But Metro can only vouch for the accuracy of its own schedules. The schedules from munis are often woefully stale.
About the only thing Metro does well with its web site is to own the metro.net domain.
At least the SoCal Transport site provides meaningful connection info… in Boston, that just doesn’t exist at all. I actually had to give up on going to a concert in the suburbs because I couldn’t get any info on the suburban community’s bus service, and so had no real reliable feeling that I’d be able to get out there after taking the commuter rail out there ;p. I’ve honestly seen this as an improvement. Same goes with New York, MTA didn’t carry any information about the private bus companies until they finally physically bought the companies back in, what, ‘02?
Furthermore, NYC doesn’t even provide a trip planner. Trips123, a private site (probably much like you describe for LA and the Bay Area), came in to fill the gap, but not very well; the answers are clunky and sometimes counter-intuitive, you’re usually better to just spend quality time with a subway map+borough bus map. NYC’s phone service ostensibly provides trip planning services, but you can often only call it from a NYC area code (key word: NYC, you can’t even call it from a suburban cell phone). Their answers are often wrong; I don’t know NYC’s system as well as I know Boston or LA, but I know it well enough that I’ve gotten multiple routes from them that lead me to say “that can’t be right.” I stopped using them because they’re incapable of providing wheelchair accessible trips over the phone, a key concern in New York. I’d be down at Washington Square Park and they’d tell me “begin your journey at Grand Central Terminal,” which is 3 miles north of the Village.
I guess, on the whole, I like Metro’s website, with two exceptions:
1) Make the subway/transitway map into a simple JPG file, and make it accessible from the front page. People shouldn’t have to dig to find a rail map. They should be making it HIGHLY visible; everyone I talk to goes “wow, I didn’t realize LA had that much transit.”
2) The service information that they put on the sign boards needs to be duplicated on a transit updates page on metro.net. It’s not enough to be able to find out this stuff once you get to the station, especially for people who take a bus to the subway (thankfully not me).
Wad, could you email me at joe@headwayblog.com? I’ve been collecting information about independent transit sites (past and present) for the Headway Wiki, and from what you’ve said here, your experiences with SoCalTIP sound instructive.
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