Getting Around on the New SFMTA Website

The long-overdue overhaul of the SF Municipal Transportation Agency’s website launched this week, and it’s certainly sleeker.

Whereas navigating the old cluttered site often felt like a walking through a maze, visitors are now greeted by drop-down menus leading to tidy, image-heavy pages with useful info on the various modes of transportation. The front page features an integrated Muni trip planner which offers a choice of using information from 511 or Google.

One colleague of mine did take issue with the hierarchical order of transport modes on the “Getting Around” page — Muni, then parking, then bicycling, then taxi, then walking, then accessibility for the disabled, etc. — which doesn’t quite match up with the “Muni, walking, and bicycling” priority dictated in the city’s transit-first policy. Granted, I’d imagine getting information on parking is one of the top reasons for visiting the SFMTA website, so it could be geared toward providing the most-requested info first.

So readers, does the new website feel more useful? Should walking and biking be placed before parking as a symbolic show of priorities? Share your thoughts in the comments.

  • Bruce Nourish

    Good lord, finally. The old one seemed like vintage 1998. It also looks like the system map has finally been updated to correctly reflect all the service changes the old one merely mentioned in the footnotes.

  • Anonymous

    Good Lord, the system map is a 24MB pdf file (did they thaw out a web developer from the 1990’s?). The navigation is horrible, esp. if trying to look up a bus route. All the old links are broken, and well, I could go on…

  • Andy Chow

    The new web site is a vast improvement with clean and mobile friendly appearance, but I think that there should be a list of modes as part of the top menu rather than having them under “getting around.” It would’ve been great to keep the old links too but the new urls are cleaner.

    The system map could use “slippy map” like interface to complement PDF. Examples include AC Transit, Monterey-Salinas Transit, etc. It is not hard to implement: http://www.transitunlimited.org/Bay_Area_rail_map

  • Anonymous

    SFMTA updating its web site, while nice, is a bit like putting a fresh layer of icing on a moldy cake.

  • Anonymous

    Ah the new web site. Looks pretty, lacks content. Daily service reports? Gone (altho they’d been creatively edited since Reiskin came to power). Route information? Heh. Going to http://sfmta.com/33 brings up a page that generates the following error over and over again:

    Unsafe JavaScript attempt to access frame with URL http://sfmta.com/getting-around/transit/routes-stops/33-stanyan from frame with URL http://www.nextmuni.com/googleMap/?a=sf-muni&r=33&d=33__IB2&s=3333. Domains, protocols and ports must match.

    I guess this is about as much as you can expect from the MTA.

    *golf clap*

  • So you still have to go to Bart.gov to get station maps? Lame.

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