With a little luck, you'll be feeling well-rested when you pull into Union Station in Washington at 6:30 a.m. You'll have just long enough to get a coffee before you grab the 6:42 a.m. northbound MARC Camden Line train to Laurel.
Thirty minutes later you'll be pulling into Laurel, where you can catch the Route 320 bus toward Baltimore. At 7:46 a.m. Monday, you can disembark at your stop at U.S. 1 and Meadowridge, where you can walk to your destination if you don't mind the risk of becoming an occupant of the cemetery in your effort to cross pedestrian-deathtrap U.S. 1.
Travel time: 12 hours, 49 minutes. Sure, it's two days past your mother's birthday.
This whole journey would simply be an exercise in the absurdities of computer-driven logic were it not for the fact there is a perfectly valid transit alternative that would have brought you to Meadowridge by 10:30 a.m. Saturday and returned you the same day.
And why doesn't the MTA's trip planner tell you about this route? Well, one of the connections involves Howard Transit's Silver line between BWI and The Mall in Columbia, and the program doesn't include schedule information for suburban transit agencies.
Pretty dumb, no?
Well, not really.
What the MTA is doing is enlisting its most computer-savvy customers in debugging its system. It wants people to go online and to expose such absurd answers and missed connections and flawed logic. It's inviting members of the public to send messages to tripplannerfeedback@mtamaryland.com pointing out its flaws.
"We are an agency that lives for customer feedback," said spokeswoman Jawauna Greene. She said Google is still in the process of feeding the MTA's information into its Google Transit program. As customers inform the MTA of trip plans gone awry, the MTA tells Google.
Eventually, the MTA plans to move into a more customized Phase 2 trip planner based on Trapeze software, Greene said.
But for now we can all be beta testers. It isn't pretty, but it's the way bugs get worked out in the high-tech arena.
Surely, my readers can uncover some trip plans that are even more goofy than my example. Please share them with Getting There as well as the MTA.
gettingthere@baltsun.com
