The company is well aware of the bugs that were the subject of complaints, says spokesmen Andrew Busch. Rather than stall the site internally, the company felt it could push out the new version as long as no features were missing.

On the call, SEPTA let us know some of its upcoming plans. With so many juicy details to share, allow us to present them in convenient bullet point format:

• Nearly five months after SEPTA integrated Google Transit with rail and subway schedules, the transit authority says it is looking to add bus routes on Friday, November 27th. SEPTA’s new redesign prominently features Google Transit in its “Plan my Trip” widget.
• SEPTA is making several pushes for real-time information online, including an upcoming feature to display the departure time and status of the next four trains of your chosen Regional Rail line and station.
• The half-dozen SEPTA blogs out there might have to watch their back. The organization says it plans on adding blogs and other content to “tell the story of SEPTA.”
• SEPTA worked on the new site for around six months before launching. The site’s Content Management System is the open-sourced Alfresco.
• The company is aware of faults such as a “career” page that still shows the old layout and an empty Regional Rail information page.

“There’s a couple blanks we may have,” said Busch, “but once we felt that there was nothing lost from the old site we thought it was a good time to get it out there.”

• A more formal announcement of the new site will come after the company cleans up all of the quirks and bugs and adds more scheduling information.

While SEPTA transit workers were on strike this month, it appears the organization’s Web team was hard at work.

As announced tweeted:

The new digs highlight SEPTA’s (sorta) cutting-edge features, like RSS feeds, Twitter account and a real-time train ticker. The home page is noticeably cleaner and continues SEPTA’s push in branding each of their services with a distinct color.

As pointed out by Colin over at SEPTA Watch, there are a few bugs to be worked out such as an empty Regional Rail page. It’s likely that the transit organization wants to fix these bugs before releasing any formal press announcements. Calls for comments to SEPTA have yet to be returned.

After the jump we take a look at some highlights from the new design.

Aesthetically, the site is definitely an improvement over the previous version, launched in late 2003, early 2004. Here are a look at some of the new features:

SEPTA is finally taking advantage of its recently formed partnership with Google Transit by including a Google option in its trip planner. When “Plan My Trip” is clicked, it takes the user to an old layout. The form’s “From” and “To” sections lack an auto-complete, something we think should be standard for transit sites that should be catering to those unfamiliar with the system.

We may be color blind, but the Buses and the Regional Rail look dangerously close in color:

And the new site even has rhythm [Using Firefox 3.0.15 on Leopard.]:

As to be expected with a large site like SEPTA, some links still take you to the old layout. Witness the career page, one of the main navigation buttons on the site:

And finally, SEPTA gets all Apple on us:

Overall, the site appears to continue SEPTA’s progress concerning its online presence and technology improvements, and for that the transit authority should be applauded. But key features such as “Plan My Trip” just redirect to the old layout, and many pages are sparsely populated or missing information all together.

As SEPTA has said many times before: They’re getting there.

SEPTA passengers and city programmers alike have reason to celebrate.

The region’s transportation organization announced today that it has integrated its trip planning services with Google Transit and that it will give third-party developers access to location and scheduling data, as reported earlier.

The first phase of SEPTA’s Google Transit offering provides route planning automated by Google for its Regional Rail, Market Frankford El, trolley routes and Norristown high-speed services. Users can enter a start point and a destination and are quickly returned directions that utilize Philadelphia’s public transportation system.

“Google Transit will help us introduce SEPTA and the convenience of using public transit when visiting our destinations in the city and the region,” SEPTA General Manager Joe Casey told members of the press on the Mezzanine level of SEPTA headquarters on East Market Street earlier today.

SEPTA plans to integrate the city’s sprawling bus lines in a second phase launch later this year, after it geo-maps 15,000 route locations. It hopes to become the first U.S. transit agency to make all of its methods of transportation available on Transit.

The developer specifications, formatted in Google’s open location and scheduling standard Google Transit Feed Specification, are already available at http://septa.org/developer.

SEPTA spokesman Brian Anderson told Technically Philly that for now, only a download is available.

“We don’t have the resources to create a developer community,” he said. An RSS feed on the developer site will keep coders up-to-date with new offerings, including the second phase bus data.

In addition to the Google Transit service, SEPTA will unveil real-time travel advisory alerts powered by Twitter later this week, and a real-time schedule building tool for Regional Rail riders in “several weeks.” That service, called “Next to Arrive,” will allow users to enter a train station and see the next four scheduled trains and their real-time travel status.

Google Transit integration was completed free of cost with the collaboration of Google and will work in conjunction with SEPTA’s current Trip Planner offering.

City Councilman Bill Green demonstrated the new service on his black iPhone 3G in front of onlookers at the media event. “It tells me what buses to take to what trains to what trolleys. I just follow those directions and I get there quickly and efficiently,” he said.

Green said this is only the beginning of city initiatives that are part of an effort to attract broadband stimulus grants that will make government data available to developers to create applications.

“SEPTA is getting there first,” he quipped.