I could not disagree more. The new website is visually attractive, and I find it very intuitive. It looks much more like a website should look in 2011.

It's not terrible, but you're correct, it could be a little more streamlined. I AM pleased to see that they're finally going to release a mobile version of the website, since even the Circulator has its own app.

It was better before, with fewer steps. I could see the details of the bus lines listed all together.

Change it back! please. You have to love programmers and engineers. They love to change things because they can.

I'm with Mitch. I got to the MARC schedule in 3 clicks from the home page. It was quite easy.

The website is visually appealing; however, it needs also to be super easy to find schedules and delays.
Since most people will access it in a hurry from their Android or iPhone, they should not have to "take it in" before figuring out where to go, it should be obvious.
Schedules should be in the top navigation bar. Delays should be above the changing picture.
The other bad part is now I can easily browse the bus lines and see where they go and click on a link. I have to open one thing for that, then close it and then pick from a list that gives me numbers only. Very unfriendly to someone to somoene looking to ride an unfamiliar route and even less friendly to a newbie/tourist.

I think this was true about the old site, too, but:
the word "schedule" doesn't appear on the home page. As in, if you click here you will find BUS SCHEDULES.
I found them under "getting around" and also under "service status" but I really didn't want to click on them.
Odd : the five tabs up top are : Getting Around, Business, Media, Regional Transit and About MTA.
I want them to be: Bus Schedules. MARC, Fares
etc..

I think they did an OK job on most of it. The service outages and updates are much more user friendly. Many other things are buried deep in menus and not intuitive at all.

They've made a move to the side, not up or down. With some tweaking, the site would be a vast improvement.

I don't like the changed site. The old site had the critical status info in a band at the top of the page. The new site puts the status info in vertical column down the left side, so I have to scroll down to see the light rail at 800x600 resolution.

I found the schedules easily and intuitively - on the left, where all the services are, click on MARC. Up comes a box for selecting your line, "from" station and "to" station, and then when you sel;ect "search", under the search result are the schedules, as well as a downloadable version.

Same deal with buses - click on the left, select your route, and it's all right there.

For the writer to say "There is now no marc schedule information whatsoever available online" is not only untrue, but is a little bizarre.

Mitch is right, it looks like it should for a site circa 2011.

I had problems trying to use the trip planner to get to BWI Airport. It doesn't show the light rail as the final connection. However, I am glad that they are making improvements to the site. Now, if they could only clean the buses and make the drivers come on time. That would be a real improvement.

I like the new website, because it does put a lot more information on the page once you click on it, for like the light rail and metro. The MARC is hard because you have to click through the drop down boxes to get to the fare information, which isnt very clear.

The other services have the schedules right on their main page, which MARC should have. Unless they eventually have the option of picking a start station and and end station and getting every departure and arrival time, the way they have it listed is pretty pointless.

While the MTA is to be commended for bring their website into the new millennium, clearly they were more concerned with style over substance. The one positive thing they've done is remove Flash from the home page, which will make mobile users extremely happy. And that's where the happiness ends.

To Mr Owens, NO this is not about not liking something new, it's about good web design.

They moved the most important information (service status) from the top of the page, to the lower left corner -- a clear no-no in web design (and I know, I'm in that business). You want the important information to display as quickly as possible, the top of the page is the best place for that, so users don't have to wait for the entire page to load.

Regarding schedules, here's how you get a MARC schedule: Go to MTA home page, open the Getting Around menu, hover over 'Services', and click MARC. But wait, still no schedules. Now you have to select a MARC line from a drop list and click the search button. The page updates, but wait, there's still no schedule. You have to click 'downloadable schedule' and get a PDF, or the 'Morning'/'Evening' links to see HTML versions. The HTML versions pop-up in a lovely AJAX window, making it impossible to set a bookmark that takes you directly to the HTML version of schedule of your choice. Setting a bookmark for schedules is EXTREMELY handy for folks who want to check schedules on a mobile device. PDF is nice, but on a mobile device, it's much faster to keep everything in HTML. I was able to deciper the HTML and figure out the URL I needed for a bookmark, but the average user won't be able to do that.

I shudder to think how much of our money was wasted on this web site design, which as near as I can tell, wasn't actually tested or evaluated by anybody that actually uses it on a regular basis. Somebody got swept up by the Web 2.0-ness of it all, and completely forgot about convenience and usability.

FAIL. FAIL. FAIL.

Developers need GTFS schedule format so we dont have to scrape pdfs...and why must we all jump through so many hoops to even get to the pdfs?

http://code.google.com/transit/spec/transit_feed_specification.html