On Wednesday, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) unveiled its new, simplified Website www.mta.info that offers its customers access to better organized and more detailed information about their daily commute.

Improvements include:

• A new "Plan&Ride" corner of the Website that for the first time puts a trip planner search feature directly on the mta.info homepage. Plan&Ride provides MTA customers with regional transit travel planning for the MTA's 12 New York counties, but also beyond those borders, into New Jersey and Connecticut. Plan&Ride offers MTA customers their choice of three trip planning systems, with Google's transit trip planner as the default.

• A real-time service status information box is front and center on the homepage and on each MTA agency homepage. The information box also provides the status of traffic on the MTA's seven bridges and two tunnels. Customers will now be able to check and see at a glance if their own subway line, bus route or railroad branch is operating with "Good Service" or if there are unexpected "Delays," "Planned Work" or "Service Changes".

• A Developer Resource Center where the MTA will make data available to software developers who are interested in creating smartphone or Web applications that help our customers.

The MTA also jointly announced with Google that the leading format for sharing data, known as the Google Transit Feed Specification, will now be known as the General Transit Feed Specification, or GTFS.