Adam Giambrone, the TTC’s chair, gave his presentation in front of Spadina Station’s new pair of LCD screens. One screen shows times for when the streetcars along the 510 Spadina route, the first route to have the system fully set up on, will arrive in the station; the other half shows a real-time map of where on the route each individual streetcar is. Facing those LCD screens (above, top), above where commuters wait for the 510 to shuffle out of the dark, is an LED screen (above, bottom) that also shows riders how long they’ll have to wait for the next car. And in no time, six thousand transit shelters across the city will have LED displays like them, and those stops without shelters or not outfitted with screens will have a stop number on them that TTC riders can use SMS to get the same information from.
The whole system uses a “predictive algorithm,” that, said Giambrone, will factor in everything—from each vehicle’s location as measured by GPS, to traffic delays, to road closures, to weather—that will only improve and refine itself over time. (The 510 route is a “few seconds” off and getting better, said Giambrone.) A set-up like the one at Spadina—which was tested intermittently over the last week, how
one BlogTO reader caught a look at them Friday morning—is also now active at Union Station. The next train arrival system rolled out in subway stations in September will also be up at every subway station by the end of 2009. It’s all, Giambrone said, the “next step in our e-initiatives” that are creating a “web of information” for riders to make “intelligent choices” about how to best use the system. By fall next year, Giambrone promised, one way or another, “you will have access to real-time information for your stop.”
George Talusan, one of the developers of the Red Rocket iPhone application, told Torontoist that “we’re excited about the TTC’s planned GPS-based departure time system and we think it will be a valuable addition for the city’s ridership.” “Hopefully,” Talusan said, “the TTC will allow third parties to hook into their system. It’s not hard to see how this functionality would be of great benefit to Red Rocket users and we would jump at the chance to integrate it.” Kieran Huggins of MyTTC.ca—which provided Red Rocket with all its stop data—agrees. “We’d love to see the TTC open the data feed up to the public,” Huggins said, “and would definitely jump on any opportunity to integrate that with our schedule data. In fact, we’ve been hoping for something along these lines for quite some time!” Huggins is interested in seeing “how the live positions match up against both [the TTC's] dataset and [MyTTC's]—it would certainly be a great tool with which to refine the accuracy of our schedules. And of course, any improvements we can make are passed down the line to anyone who wants them.”
The project will cost the TTC $5.2 million, part of which will be provided by advertising on the system’s OneStop screens—which hopefully won’t mean a compromise in the quality of information for the sake of profit. Regardless, Giambrone is insistent that the system will not be a burden to its riders, claiming that “I don’t think our riders want to pay for this.” (If you send a text message to the system to find out when a vehicle is arriving at any given stop, the TTC will not, for instance, charge you a fee on top of the one your carrier does, for that sent or received message.) And while the spacing between the C and L above the Spadina Station LCD display will surely frustrate Joe Clark, and one bystander boomed out “fuck you!” on their way past the press conference, this moment, and this year, may be a defining one for the TTC, a year when the TTC finally launched itself head-on into the future. It’s about time.
All photos by Miles Storey/Torontoist.

New

A Better Layout. It’d be hard to not improve on the TTC’s old site, and while the new site is nothing spectacular, it’s well layed-out, and, most importantly, far easier to find information on. A search box on the homepage lets you find bus or streetcar routes (by number or by name), and, if there’s no other route with a similar name (say, Bay and Bayview bus routes if you search for “Bay”), takes you right to it. There are some minor points: the TTC’s logo could look a lot better and a lot less squished; what is not working yet but coming soon should be more clearly marked off; and some boxes need to be more clearly defined from other boxes. But all in all, it’s an extremely practical and well-organized website that is infinitely better than the 10-year-old monster that preceeded it.
Schedules & Maps. Lots and lots and lots of schedules and maps, with lots and lots of info. Check out Dundas West Station’s page, for instance, which displays the location of its elevators and escalators, its opening and closing and first train and last train times. (It’s not quite as good as Sean Lerner’s ridiculously exhaustive TTC Subway Rider Efficiency Guide, but it’s a start.) Or the route map for the 501 Queen streetcar, which shows all of its stops (or just the timed or, uh, one accessible one). You can go deeper, too, and see the data for an individual stop, like Queen & Roncesvalles.
RSS. For now, it’s limited just to service alerts, but they’re expanding soon.
Improved Accessibility and Standards Compliance. We’ll have to defer to Joe Clark on this one, but it’s apparently been vastly improved. And again, it’d have been hard not to have vastly improved.
A whole lot of other stuff. Want to busk? Charter? See some event listings? Find answers to frequently-asked questions? Well, there’s that. It’s also print friendly.

Forthcoming

Trip Planner (early 2009). This is the killer feature, the end-all-be-all of any good transit system’s website; you will tell the TTC where you want to go, and it will tell you how to get there. For now, we’ll happily stick with Ian Stevens’s fantastic interactive map.
Next Vehicle Arrival (later in the fall). All TTC buses and streetcars are currently equipped with GPS notification that will allow them to use the feature, but it’s not coming just yet. Once implemented, you’ll be able to track the vehicles online—something to do if your TV is broken, joked Giambrone.
Notifications (in the fall). Though you can subscribe to an RSS feed for subway now, you’ll be able to get notification for problems of any kind, for any kind of transportation (including specific routes) via e-mail, RSS, mobile phones, etc.
Lots and lots of other stuff. E-commerce! Jobs! History!
Once you’ve kicked the tires a bit, help the TTC out and fill in their website survey.
Comments are closed; we ask, instead, that you participate in the ongoing discussion on the post announcing the website.

• There will be “trip planning, eCommerce, automated customer notification, next-vehicle arrival (they only mention “train” and “bus”), and Wheel-Trans trip booking.”
• The site will be “‘easily and quickly downloadable,’ even on a 56K modem.”
• The site will be designed “to function effectively with common versions of software, hardware, and Internet browsers (i.e., Internet Explorer 5 or higher, Netscape 6 or higher, Firefox, Opera 8 or higher, and Safari).”
• It will have “RSS feeds and [a] Blog.”
• It will have some kind of system “’for the functionality and capability of Multi-Language translations. The Company will work with TTC to define, select, and implement an optimal translation tool for a number of languages (e.g., Portuguese, Cantonese, Mandarin [not materially different when written], Italian, Spanish, French, Polish, Russian, Vietnamese, Korean, Greek, Tamil, and Tagalog).’”
• There will be “Station and route pages….; What’s New; FAQ; ‘Forward to a friend’ and print-friendly functionality; clickable maps.”
• There will be “Onscreen font and colour adjustment; ‘software to enable visitor to listen to the text’ (yes, speech output); accesskeys.”
• “There will be a public beta.”
• There will be a “‘audio/video tour’ of a station on its page. Oh, and mention of any stores in a station.”

The deadline for the RFP is September 13, which means that the trees will have started to turn before we can expect to see a redesigned TTC.ca. Nonetheless, we’re finally catching glimpses of something that we’ve been waiting a long long time for. Here’s hoping that the TTC gets it done right.
Thanks to Paige Dzenis for tipping us off!

Thanks again for your help in soliciting and compiling the submissions on the blogs concerning the TTC website redesign.
I presented the results to the TTC e-systems committee last week. To the credit of TTC staff, many of the suggestions had already been anticipated in the original RFP. However, some were not, and thanks in part to the consultation, it became clear during the discussion that the project should be reconsidered. The bloggers’ suggestions were very helpful in this determination.
The committee recommended withdrawing, re-writing and re-issuing the RFP to reflect what I think is a more ambitious and exciting project. This decision might add a little extra time–maybe a few months–but we think it will result in a better website, so it’s worth doing.
I’ll keep you posted on developments. In the meantime, of course, I am still very happy to receive comments and suggestions.
Thanks again for all your help,
Adam Giambrone
Chair, Toronto Transit Commission (TTC)

Way to go, Torontoist readers! Those of you interested in continuing to help out on a more active level may want to check out Toronto Transit Camp, a “solution playground” modeled after BarCamp that is taking place this weekend at the Gladstone.
We’re very excited that the TTC is continuing to take this very seriously, and has acted so quickly on our most important request. As always, we’ll keep you all updated as the project continues to move forward.

Attn: Mr. Adam Giambrone
Chairman, Toronto Transit Commission
Dear Mr. Giambrone,
The city’s four major Blog sites dealing with city issues – Blogto.com, Readingtoronto.com, Spacing.ca, and Torontoist.com – asked for their readers’ ideas on how to improve the TTC’s rider information website.
Thousands read about our call for suggestions. Hundreds responded. The city’s major media outlets also covered our challenge.
Attached to the formal version of this letter are two documents. One includes the complete list of suggestions made by our readers. The other integrates those suggestions in an easy to use spreadsheet (RT-TTCmatrix220107.xls). That document lists the recommendations by reader popularity and refers to the blog and comment number where reader suggestions can be found.
For example, the most popular suggestion for the site is to improve the User Interface & Information Architecture. Forty-five readers made that suggestion. The second most popular recommendation is to add a “Point-to-Point” trip planner. Twenty-seven readers asked for that. In addition, many readers offered examples of transit websites they thought worked. Those are also listed in their own category.
The blog Editors have three key recommendations:
1. Our readers – who are frequent users of the TTC – believe that their ideas, if implemented, can significantly improve the TTC website.
2. The budget for the website redesign should reflect its importance in terms of the numbers of people who refer to it (millions every month) and the potential for increasing TTC ridership. The site should be considered an essential operating budget line item rather than a marketing “frill.” As many transit systems know, a good website adds to the bottom line.
3. While we applaud the TTC for issuing a RFP for a new site, the user input our challenge generated and the media firestorm that followed it suggest the RFP be reissued to reflect the now better understood needs of TTC users.
Yours truly,
Robert Ouellette, Readingtoronto.com
Tim Shore, BlogTO.com
Matt Blackett, Spacing.ca
David Topping, Torontoist.com
Marc Lostracco, Torontoist.com

We’d really like to thank the mainstream media for helping to spread the word (CBC Radio, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, Metro, and the National Post all covered the story and directed readers to our site), Giambrone for lending us his ears, Robert Ouellette of Reading Toronto for organizing the whole thing, and, of course, our readers for all the terrific suggestions.
This is only the beginning of this process, and we will keep our readers updated as it moves forward.