I just had (okay -- it was two weeks ago, but it took me a while to recover) an unusually bad encounter with, sadly, the very well-intentioned and usually helpful Bay Area public transit trip planner. Getting from my house in the Mission District to the lab in Palo Alto (26 miles or so away) requires three forms of public transportation: subway to light rail to bus. The online trip planner, as you can imagine, is absolutely essential in coordinating all these transfers. On a good day, the trip takes 1.5 hours. On a bad day, as happened last week, I miss my usual train, take the next one, and then spend 45 minutes waiting at the Palo Alto bus stop to take a ten minute ride from the station to the lab.
Just to clear this up - I spent just as much time getting from Millbrae (in the south of San Francisco) to California Avenue (in south Palo Alto) as I did waiting at that goddamn bus stop. And as I sat there, waiting for the bus, I thought about that web page, and thought about how the little schedule spat out by the trip planner hadn't differentiated between "waiting time" and "travelling time." Nor had it offered any easy way to minimize waiting by adjusting the time or origin of my trip. Oh, I fumed and I fumed. Would it have been so hard to put the "waiting time" in a different color, even?
Then there's the lack of transparency. Over the past few months in SF, the trip planner has given three different sets of directions from the same origin to three nearby destinations. I like to believe that the system is adapting to changing traffic conditions. Or bus delays that I don't know about. However, without any insight into the algorithms behind the schedule I'm given, I'm forced to assume that the system is just trying to be funny.
This type of transportation problem - travel at a fixed time between a fairly specific origin and destination - gets solved neatly and efficiently when I buy plane tickets (including up to 4 separate hops on multiple carriers!), yet stubbornly resists solution at the municipal scale. Yes, of course: there's a lack of money, time, and interest. But I also want to point to another difficulty: the sheer complexity of the metropolitan environment. The global network of airports is a self-contained system, built to process people quickly and/or amuse them while they wait. They minimize the unpredictable. Cities (even ones with shiny new railway terminals) are exactly the opposite and do nothing of the sort. When I think about the giant mixup that is the Bay Area's buses, subways, trolleys, light rail, bicycles, and automobile traffice, I'm almost amazed that trip planners work at all.
Nevertheless, the website (which is not potentially stuck in a traffic jam and thus about to miss its transfer) could use some more color-coding.
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