This seems like (yet another) case of MARC riders complaining the loudest. To access the Metro schedule you can simply click on the "Metro" link under service status and then a very handy box in the middle that allows you to choose either weekday or weekend and westbound or eastbound. Very simple; very intuitive. The MARC info can be improved, but the rest of the website looks fabulous.

The location of the service box is a legitimate gripe, but also easily rectifiable. They should just swap that with the smiling photo of O'Malley in the upper right.

I see that you took a negative comment from another blog post and put it here. Interesting that you didn't mention the numerous positive comments. There are positives and negatives on the website and I'm sure that MTA will make some adjustments. My question is why you post a blog and grab a comment to post another blog, Why don't you let all your readers decide and stop picking and choosing based on what is so obviously your dislike of the MTA?

COMMENTL I love the MTA and want it to be the best transit agency it can be. I just don't like the new web site. I highlighted that comment because of the writer's knowledgeable analysis of what went wrong could help the agency diagnose its problems.

Mike, I strongly echo the poster's criticism of the new site. For MARC riders, it's a big step backwards, and I say this as a computer professional who deals on a daily basis with users who resist change even though it's necessary. In this case, it's a step beyond not liking something new.

The commenter basically took the words out of my mouth, but I would add this for context. At the MARC Riders Advisory Council, we were told that the updated website was coming down the pike, and we repeatedly voiced our desire to have an input on how the MARC information was presented and how our Council's information page was presented on the new site. The MTA staff we work with does a fantastic job, and they forwarded that request to the web team. All of a sudden, the new site comes out.

The MARC Riders Advisory Council was not given a single opportunity to volunteer feedback on the preliminary design, and to add insult to injury, our Council page has been reduced to a three-sentence generic boilerplate statement with no information on how to attend meetings, when/where they are held, or how to become a council member.

We are not happy.

Absolutely agree: Total FAIL. The "detailed route map" for light rail pops up as a file with miniscule, unreadable text, with no way to zoom in. The header showing the station names on the pop up schedule disappears as you scroll down the timetable, making it difficult to determine departure and arrival times. Sure, you can download the pdf, but what's the point of the supposedly quick links then? No addresses for stations, so good luck locating one that you don't regularly use. I ended up googling the stations! Pathetic.

Mr Dresser, I notice you've spent a lot of time and attention to this one issue, and echoing in particular, your MARC friend. Could you spend at least a bit of that energy spotlighting the many bus route and schedule changes that take effect this coming Sunday that the MAJORITY of MTA customers like myself ride? MARC is an important thing, but it's still just one part of the overall picture.

...Sigh, and four days later, Mr. Dresser, you haven't even made a peep about the numerous bus route changes that take effect the day after tomorrow. I guess it's not sensationalist enough for you to bother with.

MTA has a particular shortcoming in spotlighting changes like these. In this instance, few people are likely to know that the 15 to White Marsh is being replaced by a reworked 58 crosstown serving new areas, or that they can catch the new 99 as a faster alternative to the 77, until they are late to work as a result.

You say you love the MTA and want it to be the best it can be, but if you aren't willing to post information that could be vital to its riders when clued in, it seems that you too are part of the problem when you could be part of the solution. So sad.

Wow. I experienced the same problem when planning a trip last week. Sometimes letting software map your route isn't adequate, so I attempted to download maps & schedules of the lines I had to take from Baltimore to DC. "Getting There," alright, intuitive. "Maps," logical. Three links to the MTA system maps and that's it? Not good. I spent some time double-checking the links that I used to make sure that I didn't skip a step somewhere.

I didn't even pay attention to the "services" link because, I thought, it pointed to only descriptions of what the agency did, rather than host the maps & schedules. The "Maps" link on the older web site presented information in a better and expected place.

My final action was to create a route using my car to get to a WMATA Metro station. WMATA, in contrast, still has the "rail" and "bus" links near the top of its home page, and the maps & schedules are immediately accessible through sub-menu pop-ups.

I'll send a copy to the MTA webmaster. Hopefully they can change this.

The most useful thing the MTA could do would be to create an app that works much like the Charm City Circulator app. If I want to know when the next bus is coming, no prob! It picks out my location and tells me exactly when I can expect another CCC, and I've found it to be extremely accurate.

Why couldn't the MTA have something like that? It would be amazingly handy, especially when taking a different bus than normal or if I've just missed one, so I would know when to expect another bus and what number is coming next to that particular stop.