I know that you should go into things assuming the best, but given my experience with local transit, I didn’t have high hopes for the 511 Trip Planner. For lunch today, I needed to get from my office to Cosmopolitan Cafe, about 1.1 miles away. I had already hiked a mile from BART to my office and needed to trek back this evening. I wasn’t really looking to add more mileage for lunch.

Checking Ask.com’s walking directions, I confirmed that it’s further than I wanted to walk.

I went to MUNI to check the light rail schedule and from there jumped over to the Trip Planner on 511.org. I was very pleasantly surprised to find that entering in my start and end locations plus an arrival time resulted in something useful.

Unfortunately, the actual train was slower than estimated and instead of the estimated 10 minute trip, it took 20 minutes and I was late for lunch. I decided to just walk back. My lunch was caloric enough to justify the exercise anyway.