This is the personal Blog home of Brian M. Westbrook. I make no guarantees you will like what you see here -- or receive any value. If you're looking for my radio stuff, it has (for the most part) moved to: tech.brianwestbrook.com

09 November 2007

My Campaign for One Page Trip Results

I need a haircut.

Many "Green" initiatives are complex, involved projects that span multiple agencies and take months to complete. Here's one tip for the Metro KC website that can save precious resources with a few lines of code (or, more likely, a few *less* code).

My mother is in town. I lent her my vehicle today so she could trek out to Bellevue Square in (as my friends and I refer to the other side of the lake) "Eastern Washington". Hopefully she'll return with plenty of expensive gifts for me. Meanwhile, back to that haircut... I'm heading out of town for the weekend and have a busy week next week. Fortunately, I was able to schedule an appointment with Liana @ noon today. Without my car... I'll be taking the bus. Yay, fun!

So I go on to the Metro KC Transit Planner ("Plan Trip" @ transit.metrokc.gov) and enter the address of my office (1501 4th Avenue) and that of Liana’s Hair Salon (1125 E Olive Street) with an arrive-by time of 12:00 Noon. The trip results suggest three single-bus itineraries on routes 11, 10 and 49. Sorted! I print the results to take with me… two pages spit out of the printer behind my desk. (See PDF)

The second page is merely footer information and links to "plan a new trip" and invitations to "investigate alternatives". All the essentials are on the first page.

Suggestion: Compress the trip results page so that most single-bus itineraries print on one page. I suspect I'm not alone in printing my results – and all those extra wasted pages throughout the Metro transit system could be conserved. A few minutes of simply eliminating line breaks (do we need a solid bar at the top of the results?), reducing font size, or merging some results to one line (could "send feedback", "plan return trip" and "revise original entries" be place on the same line?).

Now with page two in the blue bin for each of my outbound and return trips – I'm ready to get my haircut and the world will no longer be subject to my shaggy do.

Thanks for listening and joining me in the fight for single-page transit results!