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UPDATE: Whoa Nelly! Thank you beta testers for crashing the new Trip Planner:)
Since launching the beta website, traffic has increased more than 5,000 percent causing momentary disruption in the new trip planner however, they are expected to be back up soon. Thank you for your patience!
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We’re ready to share a new version of metro.net that has been redesigned, re-engineered and updated to focus on you — our riders. Beginning today, beta.metro.net is available for preview and will continue to be in public beta until the end of the year. The anticipated launch date for the new site is January.
We invite you to check out the new website and would appreciate your comments and suggestions. All comments and suggestions will be vetted and considered for changes to the new site, which will replace the current design that dates to 2009.
We know that we have more work to do — so we’ll be posting updates on The Source on new features that we’ll be adding between now and December. Thank you for joining us on a new way to Go Metro. Here is a rundown of the new features:
New Trip Planner
We’ve rebuilt the Trip Planner from the ground up. The new trip planner is completely integrated with the website and provides multimodal options (bus, train, bike, pedestrian) with service alerts as part of your itinerary (i.e. if a service alert or planned advisory is part of your trip, it will show up on the route).
Both scheduled and realtime arrivals for Metro are included and we’ll be adding service data from 24 carriers until the end of the year. As we work to improve our trip planner we hope that you could send us feature request and/or suggestions on how we can improve this vital service.
Dynamic Maps & Map Data
You may have noticed the realtime or dynamic map that is front and center on the site. Maps are critical for travel and they are a core feature of the new website. We started with rebuilding the website’s database to use technology that recognizes geo-spatial information (addresses, latitude/longitude coordinates, etc).
This allows us to plot information on maps: service routes, bus stops, rail stations, service alerts, destination discounts and, eventually, construction notices. Many of you have been asking for this feature for a long time — and we’re ecstatic to finally build it! When entering service information, the map will react in real time to your selections. Please give it a try.
System Alerts & Advisories
As noted above, the service alert information is part of the Trip Planner and will automatically show up on your itinerary. You can still view all the alerts & advisories on one page. Throughout the years, you’ve let us know that you wanted this information in one place, rather than clicking on separate pages. Done!
Mobile First Focus
More than 65 percent of customers access metro.net on a mobile device, 30 percent on desktop computers and five percent on tablets. These metrics helped us focus the new website to be a mobile-first experience. This means that we must ensure that the core tasks needed to ride Metro — trip planning, realtime arrivals and service alerts — can be accomplished with a minimum number of clicks and the site must be easy to read and perform on small screens.
BTW: the new website uses geolocation technology — just like your mobile device — if you allow the website access to your GPS location. We’ll be improving this feature to present you more pertinent transit/travel information based on your location.
Feature available September 19th: Mobile screen capture of new Metro website, currently in beta-testing.
New Design
If you haven’t noticed, beta.metro.net looks VERY different. Our data driven approach focuses on pulling things to the forefront that you care about. We know about 75 percent of our customers access ridership info (Nextrip, maps, Trip planner, how to ride, fares). Knowing what you want helped us bring trip planning to the forefront and make it the focus of the new site!
- To keep the focus on the map, the new site navigation has moved to left side of the browser. The navigation is designed to easily find the things you want — hover over a navigation item to reveal the contents.
- Featured content in the promotional carousel has moved below the maps. They’ll be collectively displaying a theme rather than a single campaign.
- Videos: look for them, we’ve made videos a key and prominent element of a page design.
Known Issues
As we said, this is the beginning. We have A LOT more work to do. Metro.net is a huge website with many custom sections and features. Off the bat, here are some known issues:
- Red Line and Purple Line overlap on the map.
- Landmarks: customers cannot input landmarks as a destination or starting point in the Trip Planner.
- Breadcrumbs are missing from the site.
Did you catch a bug? Find a function that didn’t quite work? Have a suggestion? Please fill out our survey here and let us know!
Categories: Technology
The map to too big! Also, I use this site to check the Next Trip Planner before leaving the office….Please keep this and other quick links at the top of the page.
I used google maps to get from my home TO grand park downtown. With real time updates and nextbus, that’s all I really needed. Your web site is to slow on my iPhone 6 using google chrome. It’s likely to much client side scripting. Anyway, it’s very unresponsive compared to google maps. That’s who you are competing against. If you can’t make something better, why are you spending money building this? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just use a rebranded Metro specific version of google maps for the desktop and iOS/Android? I think arrival times at each bus stop, free Wi-Fi, bus arrival times via text, bus priority lights, private bus wsys are all innovations to be proud of. Metro.net is a transport agency. Move people around and leave software to the tech giants.
Hi Sun, thank you for your feedback.
We’re not in competition with Google – we’re actually data partners with Google, Apple, WAZE, and many others. (You can check out our growing offering of open data on our data site).
Technology-enabled customers will use the native Map application or transit/travel app of their choice, but there are also customers who prefer to get their information and trip planning from the transit agency. We can also provide additional amenities the tech companies are not surfacing (yet) such as bike racks, bike lockers, BikeShare availability, parking spaces, etc.
Per the performance, we received much more beta testers than anticipated (nice problem to have) and the traffic choked our geo-coder, but we’ll be scaling up and load testing in the next few weeks – we’ll continue to post on progress of bug fixes and added features.
Thanks again, I really appreciate your feedback.
Lan-Chi Lam
Director of Communications, Web & Mobile
Metro Los Angeles
With so many great transit apps out there why does Metro bother to develop its own? Seems highly redundant. Am I missing something?
Hello Joel! This is not an app, this is our website, metro.net
You’re right – there are great transit apps out there, but websites are still a popular information resource; so we’re taking advantage of current technology and realtime data for the web experience.
thank you!
Lan-Chi Lam
Director of Communications, Web & Mobile
Metro Los Angeles
While I get the Mobile First focus, most servers can detect the browser being used and serve a version that is slightly less screen consumptive when being viewed on a desktop or tablet.
Hi Calwatch,
The current and beta website is responsive/adaptive to all devices. The current website was retro-fitted a few years ago to be adaptive, but the beta site is responsive from the get-go. Every year the mobile usage goes up, its important to follow this and be responsive to the metric, but our website will always be available for desktop and tablets.
Thanks for your comment,
Lan-Chi Lam
Director of Communications, Web & Mobile
Metro Los Angeles
[…] Metro Is Public-Beta-Testing Its New Trip Planner Website (The Source) […]
It takes a bit to get used to it.
I think the map display is way too large. Instead of trying to guess where a reader lives, perhaps there should be a map of your entire system with links superimposed on each major area to the reader to click on to see what is available in his/her area.
When mousing over the “In the Works” entry, each major grouping, e.g., Projects, should trigger a fly-out menu to the right with links to each subgroup. Mousing over each subgroup, e.g., Transit Projects, should result in another fly-out menu listing each specific project. Thus the “In The Works” panel could be much shorter and not require the reader to scroll down to see the entire list.
Another advantageof is that the reader can qjuickly see everything that is available without clicking on any links.
Not until the reader finds the item he/she is interested in should mouse clicks be required
One thing sorely lacking is a link to the Measure M plans.
I have added it to my Bookmarks and will probably have more comments later.
Hi Frank, thanks for taking the time to give us feedback. At this stage of Beta we’re testing out the idea of going big so the customer can focus on one section at a time. Our goal with the map is to eventually leverage geolocation to provide our riders with the relevant, alerts, arrival times, and bus stops nearest to their location. Stay tuned on updates to the navigation, we’ll be rolling out new features and fine tuning the site in phases.
Thanks for your reply. One thing missing in the list of bus lines is a brief description of each line as is now on the ‘old’ site.
Since I live in Orange County, the map I always get is of the lines in the San Fernando Valley. Maybe your IT crew members are psychic, as I grew up in the Valley and graduated from North Hollywood High School. That is why I am particularly interested in the Red Line station there because I use to watch the SP steam-powered local freight switching cars on what is now the Orange Line Terminal and frequently rode the Pacific Electric Valley Line.
Thank you for the recommendation on the navigation fly-out and service description – both really good suggestions, we’ll consider it.
Lan-Chi Lam
Director of Communications, Web & Mobile
Metro Los Angeles
Thanks for your reply. I hope you make some of these changes, as they should make your new site easier to navigate.
Thanks.
…and the comments and suggestions page doesn’t seem to want to load. The schedules appear to be broken (I can search for a route, but then nothing happens) and the GPS isn’t responding.
Looks like the bug survey form is broken.
Just had a shot at the trip planner (in Chrome) – the address look-up seems to be broken – it won’t predict and auto-suggest.
It only works for destinations actually served by Metro, correct?
Hi Erik, you are correct. We’re working on adding transit data from over 24 carriers to provide better, more accurate covers of LA County.