MetroRiderLA

Two days ago I said, We want our Google Transit!

I wasn’t alone. The consensus from the 20+ comments the post received was that MetroRiders are ready for a better trip planner. What’s more, the post caught the eye of some blog-savvy Metro employees, who in defense of their employer, let fly with some very good news.

Google Transit is on its way to LA!

Metro bus data is ready to go, and Metro rail data is in the process of being added as I type. Once Metro compiles all the information, hopefully by this summer, Angelenos will have to option to “Take Public Transit” every time they search for directions on Google Maps. Why summer at the earliest, and not right now? Setting up a transit feed with Google Transit is a time consuming process that requires a lot of unglamorous grunt work, and inputing rail data is even more taxing. But what matters is that it’s been confirmed and is coming soon.

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Metro has officially launched the first phase of what it calls its “interactive video wall”, or Metro Interactive. Currently the site features various videos intended to “help customers and visitors more easily navigate Los Angeles”. It is also the new home of Metro Board Chair Pam O’Connor’s infamous online chats. Future plans for the site include: blogs, polls, user uploads, and live streaming video. Metro views Metro Interactive as “a tool to help us reach out to our customers”. Let’s see how phase one fares with this discerning customer.

First Impressions

Thankfully, Metro decided to go with a unique domain (or at least a subdomain) with Metro Interactive. Unlike Miss Traffic, which was hidden three directories deep in the Metro site, Metro Interactive can be reach by simply typing multimedia.metro.net into your web browser. Doing so will lead you to a site with the clean visual design that has been successfully standardized throughout Metro. Bold colors and imagery on a clean grid are complimented with the serious but friendly Scala Sans font. The header pays homage to the silhouettes of th now iconic iPod advertisements, portraying an image of a person holding a video camera. The site seems a little barren, with a sizable chunk of empty space in the top right corner, but keep in mind that this is the first-phase. Plus, less-is-more is always a good philosophy when it comes to design. One strange visual flaw is an unnecessarily low resolution Metro logo at the top of the page.

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In a sign of the times, MetroRiderLA introduces its first appearance on the social networking powerhouse Facebook. MetroRiderLA has had a presence on MySpace for quite some time now, but since MySpace is old hat and Facebook is the new hotness, we’re joining the new school. The MySpace profile is somewhat clunky anways, and it looks like the Facebook group will enable further discussion and community involvement in addition to the blog itself. We’ll see. If you’re a Facebook member, join the group today, and spread the word to all your Facebook friends. Let’s let social networking help strengthen the Los Angeles Transit Oriented Lifestyle!

Links:

• MetroRiderLA on Facebook
• MetroRiderLA on MySpace
• MetroRiderLA on Flickr