This area has two different transit agencies as an artifact of the insane measures it takes to pry open the wallets of our car-centric neighbors to pay for public transportation.
Metro is the principal system with express routes, local routes and milk runs across the region. Metro's schedules are provided on a route-by-route basis in the form of little folded single sheets you can tuck in your pocket. You still have to pick up new ones for the routes you use about every six months since they can't seem to leave the schedules alone for longer than that (for example, the 200, a jitney that runs all around Issaquah had a single one of its daily runs shifted recently)
Sound Transit is the newcomer funded by a ballot measure a few years back. They've taken over most of the express bus business from Metro and also do some heavy rail commuter routes as well as oversee the construction of the new Seattle light rail line. Sound Transit schedules are all published in a single staple-bound book about the size of a small trade paperback.
Neither system provides a decent way to print out a single route schedule from their web page.
I live in Issaquah where only one Sound Transit route is relevant to me, the 554 which runs in a relatively speedy 30 minutes from Issaquah to Seattle. I didn't want to schlep around their novel of schedules so I'd know the details for this one route, and I didn't want to print out the 10 pages of paper it would take to print it out (plus the aggravation of having to use IE since their printable view doesn't work in the standards-compliant browsers).
So I scraped their four different pages of 554 info and recombined them into a single page suitable for printing 2-up double-sided for a one-sheet printable Sound Transit 554 schedule. Which I provide to my fellow Issaquanians with my compliments.
Posted by jeffy at October 11, 2005 04:00 PM