Second Ave. Sagas

With little fanfare, MTA kinda, sorta goes mobile

Written by

Benjamin Kabak

in

Let’s pretend it’s the middle of December, about 24-48 before everyone heads out of work for a ten-day vacation. Would you say that’s a good time to drop a major technological upgrade onto expectant customers?

Of course not. But you don’t work at the MTA.

Shortly before the Christmas holidays, the MTA unveiled its new mobile website to nearly no fanfare. The launch came, if I recall correctly, on the Thursday before the holidays began, and no press release arrived touting something that customers, used to no mobile communication from the MTA, had long desired.

Rather, the site is trumped by a link on MTA.info that takes you here. At that page, the MTA promises that “even while you’re on your way, the MTA will be Going Your Way.” The site, it says, has been optimized for WAP-enabled mobile browsers. BlackBerries, iPhones, Treos, regular old cell phones, you know it, it works. Sort of.

“When you’re on the go, all you need to access the most frequently used parts of the MTA website is any web-enabled hand-held device — and mta.info will optimize its Schedules, Maps, and Service Alerts/Advisories for you when you visit the site,” the Authority promises. “You’ll also be able to access a text-only version of the entire site from your web-enabled hand-held computer, organizer, or cell phone for your convenience.”

But that’s a catch: The site isn’t really optimized for any mobile device because it relies heavily on PDF files to convey information. Now, I don’t know about your cell phone, but neither my LG CU500v nor my BlackBerry Curve can open PDF files without generally unreliable third-party applications.

Some parts of the MTA’s mobile site are great. It’s easy to find the Trip Planner, and emergency service alerts are displayed prominently on site. The weekend service summaries and the weeknight service changes are WAP-friendly, and the individual subway line maps are available on the web as well.

But don’t look for that full map of the subway system, the Metro-North routes or the LIRR, and you can forget about the bus maps, too. Those are all PDF files. A simple image — or a series of images as this popular iPhone download utilizes — would be an easy coding job for anyone with working knowledge of mobile Internet browsers.

As with so much the MTA does, the mobile site is a welcome addition to the online resources available to New York City Transit riders. With so many New Yorkers glued to their cell phones and BlackBerries, having vital travel information at our fingertips is a long-overdue development. But I don’t understand the heavy reliance on PDF files. It turns a great project into one that is only halfway there.

Comments

5 responses to “With little fanfare, MTA kinda, sorta goes mobile”

  1. Cap’n Transit

    I’m guessing that the parts of the website that use PDF files are parts that still haven’t been optimized for mobile readers, so the question is a more general one: why use PDF files on the MTA website at all? I can think of three reasons for a heavy use of PDF files.

    First, PDF files are hard to tamper with. But it’s not like people are likely to go distributing counterfeit bus schedules and subway outage notices.

    Second, PDF files print more reliably than HTML. But many of the schedules are odd paper sizes, and have to be either shrunk or tiled to print legibly on standard letter paper.

    Third, it’s relatively easy to create PDF files from Word documents and Adobe Illustrator. This is the most compelling explanation: that the people who created these maps, schedules and service outages are used to standard WYSIWYG word processing and drawing software, and nobody at the MTA has been able to get them to change to something that’s more web-friendly.

    I’d love to see the schedule data available in an actual database that allows for flexible queries (not just the canned queries that the commuter railroads use). I have a program for my Palm that can show me the next five trains or buses leaving on a given route, but it needs to have all the data entered in a particular format.

    Reply
  2. Tomás

    I spotted the link on the days around Christmas day. I think it wasn’t available before that date.

    I posted on my own blog about this issue on December, 29th. The link is here (in Spanish). You’re right. There was no press release on this matter. I also tried to access from my cell phone (Sony Ericsson k610i) and works well except for the pdf files. I think it’s a first step from the Authority.

    On the meantime, there’s an application to read pdf files, available on this website: http://designtion.com. You have to write the address of the pdf and the application converts to text. I don’t like it so much, but it’s a help, anyway.

    Reply
  3. Second Ave. Says MTA Mobile App Lacking « Trainjotting

    […] Ave. Says MTA Mobile App Lacking Posted by TJ under MTA   Our subway-obsessed friends at SecondAvenueSagas put the new MTA mobile Website to the test, and find mixed results. The new platform is geared toward giving you train service alerts, […]

    Reply
  4. slappy

    PDF files open fine on my Blackberry Pearl. They may be too big for your network to handle in any convenient way, though. Those maps are big files.

    Reply
  5. The Secret Conductor

    I think PDF work well for scaling and details. Not sure of any other reason for using them.

    I do look forward to the MTA doing something big with their site. It would be a number 1 destination on the web if it was more handy with info… I think going mobile is a good step in the right direction. As for not promoting it, I think they just wanted to give it a test run for a bit. Even if that is not true, I do think it best not to offer it through a press release when their is more to be done with it I think.

    Reply

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