A tale of two transit websites

The WMATA’s website presents a clear, clean and informative home page. (Click the image — and the thumbnail below of the MTA’s website — to enlarge.)

With The New York Times proclaiming New York to be over and with a new day dawning in the White House today, all eyes will be on Washington, DC.The Nation’s Capitol will have to cope with a crush of people, and the WMATA — a financially beleaguered transit system — will bear the brunt of the crowd.

Absurd Style Section articles aside, Washington’s transit website certainly earns the crown in the Internet wars. Last month, the WMATA unveiled a spiffy new website design, seen above, and the reaction was uniformly positive. Greater Greater Washington gave the site a good review, and I sat here in Brooklyn jealous of the WMATA’s AJAX-based, informative and easy-to-navigate new design.

Just look at that thing. On one screen, without having scroll down, a user gets a clear sense of what the WMATA is all about. There’s a trip planner in the top-right corner and a real-time display of train, bus and elevator status updates beneath is. Along the top are links to the system map and next train information, something sorely lacking in our subways. The centerpiece of the page is a rotating news story with links to the latest WMATA releases. Below that are key information boxes with links to pages about the SmarTrip Card and inauguration advisories.

Putting the MTA’s site — at left; click to enlarge — under a similar microscope reveals some stark differences. The main role of a transit agency’s website is to aid the rider in his or her efforts at getting from point A to point B in a timely fashion. The WMATA’s site fully realizes that goal; the MTA’s site does not. It shouldn’t take three clicks to get to the service advisories or latest news releases.

On the homepage, not all of the content on the MTA’s site fits above the fold and what is on top is arguably unimportant. The MTA in Pictures box is a nice touch, but it adds nothing of informative value to the site. Having the MTA’s powerful Trip Planner there would be a far better use of space. In fact, the Trip Planner gets very little play on the home page. It is the 18th of 21 links on the right side of the page, most of which don’t aid the casual rider in getting information he or she needs. A link to the Sustainability Webinar is useful for research, but the event was seven months ago. No one really needs that anymore.

For the most part, the boxes in the center column contain useful information but are generally not too timely. To get to the main list of MTA news releases, a user must click through two links. On the WMATA’s site, everything is right there. The MTA’s site can be as fun as a frustrating game of hide and seek.

Now, I realize that the MTA is a conglomerate of many different agencies, and I know that New York City Transit’s homepage features the Trip Planner link front and center. The main site, however, should be more user-friendly. Get me where I want to go first; tell me about Elliot Sander’s March presentations later.

As the MTA gears up for another week of abuse during the public hearings on the fare hikes and service cuts, the Board members and officials who opt to sit through the torture will hear a common theme. The MTA leadership is out of touch with the riders, people say.

We could debate the truth of that allegation for words on end, but in 2009, all it takes is the website, the true public face of the authority. If the MTA could present an easy-to-use and informative site as the WMATA has done, people would begin to think better of it.