New York City Transit Authority - Trip Planner

Trip Planner

In December 2006, MTA New York City Transit launched Trip Planner, its online travel itinerary service. Trip Planner offers users customized subway, bus, and walking directions within all five boroughs of New York City, as well as service alerts and service advisories for planned track work. The service was developed and is maintained by NYC Transit with the assistance of Technology and Information Services and its outside vendor Trapeze. It is accessed through the official website of the MTA.

Similar to MapQuest, which offers driving directions, Trip Planner provides search fields for starting address and destination address, and allows end users to navigate the complexity of the subway and bus system by narrowing their options to subway, local bus or express bus only, minimizing the number of transfers or time, and adjusting the walking distance to and from the transit stop.

In October 2007 NYCT unveiled an addition to the Trip Planner site when it launched Trip Planner On the Go! This service allows users with mobile access to the web to obtain travel itineraries while away from a desk or laptop computer. Trip Planner On the Go! was made applicable for cellular phone, PDA, or Blackberry users, and offered the same three-option travel directions along with real-time service alerts. The back end programming for On the Go! was “developed using XHTML technology and the latest Microsoft Dot Net Framework in a clustered environment.” By the end of October 2007, NYCT boasted more than 5,000 daily customers using Trip Planner.

In February 2008 NYCT announced an upgrade to the mapping system using NAVTEQ and Microsoft Virtual Earth software similar to mapping sites such as Google Maps and MapQuest. The new software offered more accurate street grids, included business and points of interest, and allowed users to view the maps in aerial, and 3-D points of view. To date, the aerial and 3-D views are not available on Trip Planner’s mobile service.

In June 2008 NYCT announced it had reached 10,000 daily visitors to Trip Planner. Since the announcement, the number of visits to the service eclipsed the number of telephone calls to the agency’s travel information hotline. The following month, TIS launched Trip Planner as a widget application, allowing users to download the service and add it to their personalized homepage, blog, or website.

The Trip Planner has since largely replaced the NYCTA call center on NYC Transit's phone number.