[Note, I had a lot of drafts piling up, so this post is a little late and some criticism of Train Time will seem out of place in previous posts]

Wow, I have so much going on lately I really can’t take the time to write the detailed post this announcement deserves (yet) – but I need to at least let you know…

MTA has made some significant and relevant features to its website – but most importantly the homepage.

The homepage is no longer a massive hodgepodge bureaucratic newsletter with little gifs of MTA branding piled along the side.

Its a homepage which is designed to provide online customer services.

I know, for commuters it may seem that 15 years on in the world wide web, MTA may have decided that maps, schedule information, transit directions and service disruptions should have taken center stage many moons ago, but better late than never.

Most notably, Google’s transit directions are right on the front page, allowing you to find your way from point to point and letting Google figure out the rest for you, much like HopStop.

There is also an app alongside it which lists service issues.

Metro-North also gets a Train Time app which alerts users to realtime train info – fantastic!

Unfortunately, a lot of the site beyond the frontpage has remained unchanged except for the new navigation banner – the Metro-North schedule form, for example. I think they also did an image resizing job on their Metro-North map to make it fit the new site width – unfortunately this made the station names very hard to read. If you have a 1024x display or larger, you might want to use our Metro-North Map.