Lost in NY? New MTA Website Leads the Way

Finally, the MTA launched a website offering transit directions that actually work. We tried out their new Trip Planner and were surprised to find that the site offers bus directions as well as subway directions, and best of all, it even includes scheduled times for bus and subway arrivals and departures. After many years of wrestling with the Brooklyn bus map to visit our friends around the borough, this is a very pleasant surprise. According to the NY Post, the website will soon be accessible to cell phones and PDAs, and there is talk of installing Trip Planner kiosks in certain stations, but there are still some bugs to work out…

“The planner occasionally gets thrown off by how the starting and ending addresses are entered, and occasionally suggests getting off the subway and switching to a bus when a few more stops would bring riders within five blocks of their destination,” the Post reports. We hit a snag when we tried find directions to Aviator Sports because “Hangar 5, Floyd Bennett Field” did not compute as a destination address, but we were able to get directions by dropping the “Hangar 5” and just typing in “Floyd Bennett Field.” If you don’t mind fiddling with it a bit, the Trip Planner could prove to be an extremely useful tool.

Has anybody else tried it out yet? Do the subway trains normally arrive on time?
NYC Transit Directions Get Better [NY Post]