This isn't exactly news, but since Dart announced, with lots of fanfare, the advent of its mobile website, I've wanted to write a review. And... I give it 1-1/2 stars out of five. In short, I found it to be pretty much a waste of time, a bit of a joke. It's almost useless to me.

Now, I was pretty excited when it was first announced... when I checked it out, not so much. You can visit the site at this URL, which you can also find on the DART home page, up at the top right. (It’s easy to miss.) I've also added it to the list of useful links on the sidebar to the right of this blog.

One of the main things I’d like to be able to access on the mobile website is, of course, bus schedule information. But when I click on “Routes & Schedules,” it takes me to a county selection page, then to a route selection page, and finally... ta tah!... to a teensy weensy version of the same humongous pdf of the paper schedule that you get from the main website. Even with a magnifying glass, this is unreadable on my Blackberry. Maybe it would work on one of those expensive, nearly-tablet-size smartphones. But it doesn't help me, and it won’t be usable by most smartphone users. Sure, most browsers, if they can view pdf files, can also magnify portions of the page. But with bus schedules, you need to see more than little magnified bits. You need to see the header, to get the stop ID, and then way down the columns for the arrival times, at which point you've lost the stop ID headers. Not to mention that it is easy to get lost and be looking at a Saturday schedule when you think you're looking at weekday times. Big pdf tables, in other words, just don't work well on smartphones. So all this schedule stuff... not usable.

So maybe the Trip Planner would work better? When I clicked on that button, it took me to a page that calls itself a DART Google trip planner and asked me to put in my departure and destination address, along with date and time. When I entered said data and clicked to get directions, it took me to... the Google home page. The main search page, not even a map page. Now I use a Blackberry. This feature works better on my laptop browser, and presumably may work on some smartphones. But it was apparently not checked comprehensively.  

Not to mention that it's easier to just go directly to the Google Map website, because that's all the DART page does... allow input of your data in a manner no easier to use than Google's, and then transfer it to Google and open Google's map showing your route. You can do this yourself on any phone that can access Google Maps, or even better, that has a Google Maps app. This DART mobile feature is kind of a sham and adds nothing new. It's just an overlay making it look like they've done something. They haven't.

So, what is the DART mobile page good for?

• You can click on “Rider Alerts” to find out if there is anything happening that could affect your trip. But if you use DART transit, you should already be signed up for DART alerts via text messages and e-mail. Plus, as I've learned since they started a big DOT construction project in my neighborhood, DART no longer seems to feel the need to alert riders about temporarily defunct bus stops. 
• You can get a list of DART contact phone numbers. Of course, if you have a smartphone you can also get this from the main website without much trouble, so the mobile version isn't really needed.
• DART can congratulate itself on having a mobile site to serve its customers. (The fact that they can’t use it to do much of anything likely won’t prevent them from claiming this.) I suspect this may actually be the most important function of the mobile website.

Now, one of these days we'll be able to access something like NextBus and get real time bus arrival time data for our trips. And we'll surely link to that from DART's main and mobile web pages. That will be worthwhile. But this effort seems mainly pro forma.