Five weeks into the semester and I realized that I have neglected to announce the winner of this website's annual competition for Calgary's Worst Website. This year’s winner is Calgary Transit, the portal for the city’s LRT and bus transit system.

The previous winner was chosen on the basis of the terrible design of the pages; while there is a great deal that could be improved about the visual qualities of http://calgarytransit.com/, the site’s worst aspect is, to me, its user interface, which I’ve critiqued in the past. Modern web technologies mean that the second decade will be focused on user-centric design: intelligent, responsive sites that quickly provide relevant, timely information to the user regardless of the device used… all aspects of which the Calgary Transit site leaves a great deal to be desired.

In discussions leading up to this award I’ve faced objections that the city’s transit system has a limited budget (an annual operating cost of $277.5 million) while trying to service an exploding population (now 1.2 million people) and suburbs that are creeping ever outwards. How can I justify pushing for a total site redesign under those conditions?

Let’s put it in perspective. A new Nova model LFS bus, as currently employed in Calgary Transit’s fleet, costs approximately $300,000. Ongoing operating costs for the vehicle – fuel, cleaning, maintenance, etc. – will easily double that.

For 1/10^th of that bus, you could have a complete, usable Calgary Transit website. And in terms of return… well, a Nova carries 40 people in an hour’s commute. A well-made website could serve that many Calgary Transit customers per second… and lead to far more efficient use of resources, with an intelligent routing system that would lead commuters to make better use of transit services.

When people are making their own sites to work out Calgary transit services – in the case illustrated to the left, a Google Maps mashup made with a budget of $25,000, made as a project by a professor at Mount Royal University – you know that something is seriously wrong with the original site.

Of course at the same time there are competing interests: a petition to push Calgary Transit to 24/7 service, and to upgrade the bus stops. Both are worthy causes; either, if followed through with action, would increase costs for the transit service significantly. And CT does deserve kudos for its responsive Twitter presence and (in my experience) courteous staff.

Another entirely appropriate objection is the possibility that Calgary Transit’s customer base does not use browsers that are capable of supporting the kinds of features that I feel are reasonable. And that’s possible – although I would counter that we simply don’t know. Calgary Transit does – they have Google Analytics on their site, bless them – but anyone else is simply guessing. I would counter with the fact that Calgary is among the most wired (and wireless) cities in the world, and that I would hope that the bulk of the population has graduated from IE6… but even if they haven’t, there are tools like ChromeFrame and html5shiv to bring them into the second decade of this century.

And it may well be that an external, outsourced solution is the answer: if CalgaryTransit follows the lead of the site above, and provides its routing and schedule information under the auspices of OpenData, we could well have a half-dozen different portals for transit information, all using the same, rapidly updated information.