What Happened to the NARP Website?
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- Written by John DeLora
- Category: Blog
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If you've ever been to the NARP website before, you’ll notice it has a much different look. Last year, NARP obtained a grant from the Sally Mead Hands Foundation to upgrade our site; what you're looking at is the product of a year's worth of hard work.
We’ve kept all the popular features, such as the Hotline and Blog—and made them more prominent, so it'll be easier to tell when they've been updated. But we’ve also added some new features and we think will prove popular—and they're accessible at any time in the new navigation menu located across the top of the site.
One feature you’ll definitely want to check out is the new “Train Status” page, which lets you track Amtrak trains on a map as they move across the country. To use it:
- Click on the “Train Status button near the top of the page.
- Choose which area of the country you want to check and click on it.
- The boxes represent the position of the trains and their last reported position.
- The number in the box is the train number; a green number means the train is within 30 minutes of schedule; yellow means 30-90 minutes late, and red means more than 90 minutes late.
- If you hold your cursor over the train number, it will show the last reported status.
- If you click on the train number, it will show the train’s progress station by station so that you can see where the train lost or made up time.
Another feature that will be useful to travelers is our station list, located in our "Travel Guide" menu. We have over 500 stations listed; each station page contains:
- A photo of the station from the viewpoint of a driver approaching it (a handful of stations need photos taken from this vantage point; if you have such a photo, please forward it in the manner described below)
- An enlargeable map of the station
- Parking conditions
- Whether the station is staffed, open but unstaffed or closed.
- Whether baggage service is available.
- Whether intercity bus connections are available to non-Amtrak cities.
- Local transit links if the station is served by local transit
- We are working on adding additional features in the near future
In addition, we have added a section containing NARP “White Papers”, which are scholarly, peer-reviewed papers on different aspects of public transportation. Each paper is thoroughly footnoted to provide sources for the information given.
You must log in on the home page to get access to “members-only” content, which contains very useful data for advocacy efforts. We encourage you to explore the site; we think you’ll be pleased by the amount of information on it, and the ease of navigation through the site.
Thousands of pages of material are on the new site—both new and imported from the old website. In an effort this large, some mistakes are bound to creep in. We would appreciate it if you alert us to these by pointing out specifically what and where the error exists, and to forward the information to jdelora[at]wowway.com.
I hope you enjoy the enhanced usability that the website will provide!