Chicago’s Regional Transit Authority (RTA) has a mobile site (www.rtamobile.com<\/a>) with a trip planner and schedules for all the agencies that operate rail and bus transit in the greater Chicago area. I’ve been to Chicago several times and have been impressed with the city’s public transit system – fast frequent rail service goes almost everywhere and where rail doesn’t go there is good bus service. I had high expectations for RTA’s trip planner. I have to say I was disappointed.<\/p>\n
Actually RTAmobile isn’t too bad – if it works on your phone. The problem is that the site relies heavily on JavaScript which probably less than 10% of current phones support. Granted RTA bills it as a “PDA accessible” site rather than a mobile one. The PDA is dead but the modern equivalent is the smartphone and smartphone browsers generally can do Javascript. But smartphones represent less than 10% of the web enabled mobile market. There’s nothing about RTAmobile which requires a touchscreen or high-resolution. In fact most of the screens are very sparse and would barely fill a budget phone’s 128x128px screen. Plenty of other transit agencies have created mobile transit sites<\/a> that work with almost any browser. London’s<\/a> is probably the best with Portand<\/a>, Denver<\/a>, Seattle<\/a> and Washington (wml)<\/a> also being good examples. It’s not like RTA’s doing anything fancy that requires JavaScript either. The site mainly uses JavaScript to create links that populate and then post a hidden form when clicked. The end result looks and acts just like a link – why not use a link!<\/p>\n
Link: <\/small> www.rtamobile.com<\/a> (cHtml)<\/p>\n
Ratings – Content: Usability:
<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Chicago’s Regional Transit Authority (RTA) has a mobile site (www.rtamobile.com) with a trip planner and schedules for all the agencies that operate rail and bus transit in the greater Chicago area. I’ve been to Chicago several times and have been impressed with the city’s public transit system – fast frequent rail service goes almost everywhere and where rail doesn’t go there is good bus service. I had high expectations for RTA’s trip planner. I have to say I was disappointed. … Continue reading