Metro News Release

For immediate release: October 9, 2007

Metro Web Site Named One of Transit Industry's Best

Metro’s Web site (www.metroopensdoors.com) has been awarded a gold star and named one of the top five transit Web sites by More Riders Magazine, a new publication that aims to increase transit ridership. Metro received the award during the annual meeting of the American Public Transportation Association this week.

The publication examined more than 150 transit Web sites to determine which sites did the best job of providing information to current and prospective riders. The judges looked at both the quality of information and ease of use. Scoring categories included rider information, time-sensitive information, rider/community engagement and ease-of-use.

“I am honored that More Riders has chosen Metro’s Web site as one of the nation’s top five transit Web sites, particularly because the rating criteria were strongly customer focused,” said Syd Garriss, Web team leader for Metro.

Since first launching the Web site in 1996, Metro has continually made improvements to meet customer needs, including redesigning the site to make it easier for current and potential Metro users to find information and increasing the site’s band width to speed the viewing and downloading of large files such as bus maps.

Web site usage has grown from 1 million page views per month in 1999 to more than 27 million page views in September. The site’s most popular feature is the Trip Planner which provides point-to-point travel itineraries once users input a starting place and destination. Last month, the Trip Planner completed 1.94 million online searches.

News release issued at 12:00 am, October 9, 2007.