A very well designed journey planner
Most cities now develop their journey planners, to help people find their way around using various modes of transport. London’s TfL Journey Planner is useful but the best i have found and used so far is Brighton’s Journey On.
Not only it provides you with a neat table detailing the various options (walking, cycling, public transport, car), but it also gives estimated cost, estimated carbon emissions, and the amount of calories you would burn.
And if all this information above wasn’t enough, it also provides you with an altitude profile for the cycling option, which is really useful as Brighton is very hilly.
The design is simple and effective. The main colours are black and white, with an additional touch of purple pink used for links and part of the logo. Additionally, while the website carries out the search, it displays a funny or surprising anecdote or statistics about transport underneath the customary “loading” icon.
An example of simple, beautiful, user friendly and efficient design for all other journey planners websites to be benchmarked against.
Edit (17th April 2008):
Following comments from reader Mark Aberdour from Bricycles (Brighton, Hove and District Cycling Group at http://www.bricycles.org.uk/), it appears that there is a problem with the backend of the website, whereby it doesn’t always display the best cycling route, and recommends cycling routes similar to the car routes. This is clearly an issue and indicates that all the design efforts have gone into the front end, which is really neat and user friendly, but isn’t actually efficient at delivering the information people go there for in the first place.
What about your city’s journey planner? Is it user friendly and accurate?
Additional resources:
Brighton’s Journey Planner http://www.journeyon.co.uk/
Legible London http://www.legiblelondon.info