Crossposted to Spacing’s Wire.

The blog Radiant Core was inspired by TTC Chairman Adam Giambrone’s call to bloggers for suggestions to improve the TTC’s website and the subsequent attention the call received from bloggers in the Toronto blogging community and the national media. As a result, Radiant Core gathered a team of some of the best web designers in the community and sat down for a thorough brainstorming session. The results of their discussions can be found here and are well worth reading.

I would say that Radiant Core sets the bar in critiquing the TTC’s official website, and offering suggestions on how to transform it into a useful resource that would be the envy of the world.

The TTC Timeline system was ahead of its time - a phone number for every stop with recorded schedule information - so far ahead, in fact, that it’s one of the only real Y2K bugs that we know about. The system was shut down in late 1999 as it become evident that “…the TimeLine system is not Year 2000 compliant and because of the age of the system hardware and other factors, it cannot be upgraded in a cost-effective and timely fashion to allow for its continued use past December 31, 1999.” (see TTC Report F591). We’d like to see a return of the Timeline, but this time as an SMS-based service which works by sending your stop ID to a TTC shortcode and getting a schedule update back. The same stop IDs can be used throughout the Schedules and Route maps to remain consistent across the whole system and to make it easy to get schedule info whenever you see an ID.

You should read the whole thing, and the TTC would do well to read it to, and find the resources to make it happen.