The Toronto Transit Commission's website is bad, and not in some sort of 80's dangerous and exciting way – just traditional "the opposite of good." It doesn't provide much of what it should and those things that it does offer are difficult to find and often in less-than-ideal formats. They're not being malicious, but they're exposing us all to a numbing mixture of outdated web design and the TTC's oft-discussed lack of focus on user-experience (here and here, say).
On top of this, a couple of recent Google Maps mash-ups, created by individuals who are not billion-dollar organizations, made it pointedly clear, by example, how behind the times and rider-needs the TTC's site is:
A few weeks ago, Robert Ouellette issued a call-to-arms through his Reading Toronto post How Would You Improve The TTC Web Site?, asking TTC-enthusiasts with web and design know-how to weigh in with their opinons.
In response, Jay Goldman convened a group of opinionated people, including, to my delight, me, for a few hours of discussion. He wrote up the result into a thorough and lucid set of recommendations over at the Radiant Core Blog. I encourage you to go have a look.
I'm billed, in the writeup, as a TTC Guru, which is embarrassing enough for me to protest here but not so much, you'll notice, for me to have it changed. Much of what I've obsessively learned about transit policy and planning in Toronto has been based on the efforts of James Bow's excellent Transit Toronto and the muck-raking city planning document scourers in the transit section over at the Urban Toronto forum. Along with Steve Munro's site, these are required reading if you have to understand me when I start going on (and, truth be told, on) about such things.
In other transit- and people-I-know-related news, Andrew Moore, AKA A.M., has released a new album called Underground — "organic atmospheric electronica; a soundtrack to a day in the life of an underground transit system." A.M. recorded ambient noise, snippits of overheard conversation, and the mechanical goings-on over hours spent in the Toronto subway system, and then blended them with samples and live instrumentals. It's definitely worth a listen, and it's been getting some press recently [ Globe and Mail | BlogTO ].
Great maps! If only the folks at Eyebeam Research would refurbish their originally very cool but extremely clunky NYC subway version:
http://nycsubway.eyebeamresearch.org/
It seems like there would be a 'market' for a generic package of code that would take route data and map it onto a city. You'd think the time it would take to go from this TTC map to every city in the world having one would be very low. The fact that this isn't so burns me... perhaps to the point where I'll read up on the code this weekend?
Posted by: George at January 17, 2007 08:15 PM