First Day

The first day at my new gig was pret­ty much as I expect­ed, lots of meet­ing peo­ple and paper­work, but I did get to start out on some mock-up designs for one of our clients. The only bad thing that hap­pened was the RTA. I’d had luck in the past with it, but that was only tak­ing a Rapid route to the Air­port. Try­ing to fig­ure out bus sched­ules is an exer­cise in futil­i­ty. They real­ly need a ful­ly redesigned site. And bus sched­ules in the emp­ty slots in every bus. And a trip plan­ner that isn’t worth­less. You can’t put in your home address and des­ti­na­tion and get the best route, you have to put in the clos­est bus stop to your source and des­ti­na­tion, which, if you don’t know where one is, makes the fea­ture noth­ing more than a bug. Even once you fig­ure out which stop is clos­est, it might tell you that you have to walk a half mile to a dif­fer­ent stop and will give an esti­mat­ed trip time of 5 min­utes over four miles and includ­ing walk time between trans­fers. And all stops for a bus aren’t list­ed on the sched­ules. Also, the bus­es don’t run on Euclid because of the con­struc­tion, but the updat­ed routes aren’t post­ed.

The RTA pro­vides NO easy way to plan and use their sys­tem. I’m still going to work it out for my own self, because I’m not going to pay $95/mo to park down­town. I just wish I did­n’t need a slide rule and sex­tant and zodi­ac chart to fig­ure out which bus to take.