Note: I’m still on holiday, returning Monday Jan 4!

If all is going according to plan, you should keep an eye out for some great improvements to our transit trip planner today (or shortly thereafter!)

Here’s the list of improvements I’ve been told about:

• The big one: there is now a widget which searches for addresses as you type them into the from/to fields, so you can select your match right away. It also recognizes common contractions such as E or Hwy, etc. This functionality also carries over to Next Bus and Schedule lookup.
• Early in your trip plan, you can now select some trip options, such as minimize walking or no Skytrain or others.
• We’ve added an Olympic Preferred Route option for planning trips.
• For the first time, we will have a mobile Trip Planner that can be used by web enabled cell-phones!
• Alerts and information we know about your planned trip will be shown right in your results, so you can get up-to-the-minute information about what might affect your travel plans.
• The schedule lookup has been revamped so that it all fits on one page and is easily printable.

I’m still away, but feel free to explore and discuss – I’ll get answers for you once I’m back!