East-West Gateway’s website is old and outdated. Not surprising for a design that likely harkens back to the beginning of this millennium. The design, however, reflects poorly on the agency responsible for the proper allocation of hundreds of millions of dollars for projects within the Greater St. Louis area. Worst of all, the website’s navigation and content make it difficult for any website visitors to find the information they are seeking.
Beginning with the “About Us” page, the page’s content contains a single link to a PDF of the table of contents for East-West Gateway’s 20-year transportation plan. No other links or clues exist on the page pointing to the rest of the transportation plan’s content. Elsewhere on the “About Us” page is a clickable map with links for the various counties that make up the St. Louis region; they are all broken.
The “Other Links” page, while occasionally updated, has not been copyedited in a long time. Some of the links are “new” since 2000!
About MetroLink
One of the great things about the Moving Transit Forward is the way it clearly shows the available MetroLink expansion options. Even better is how the plan mentions multiple times that the ultimate decision making responsibility on which corridor to build first lies with East-West Gateway, a responsibility many people mistakenly ascribe to Metro. However, trying to gleam more detailed info from East-West Gateway’s scattered corridor pages and reports is a frustrating experience.
The most obvious page to go to find information about MetroLink should be from the “MetroLink” tab in the lefthand menubar. Included on the page is a map of potential MetroLink corridors (good), but the map is out of date (bad). Buried within the lengthy text is a link to a St. Charles MetroLink page that doesn’t work, a useless PDF link describing the MTIA process, and a link to the relevant corridor plans that’s broken.
As it turns out, the MetroLink corridor plans and reports are best reached via the “Corridor Studies” tab within the “Transportation” tab within the “Programs/Projects” tab. The page makes pains to list the eight work elements that can be found on the next page linked below. Only the MTIA and Cross County studies are visible on that page. To view the reports for the MetroSouth and Northside-Southside corridors, one must click the “Reports/Papers” link hidden within the “MetroLink Cross-County Corridor” section.
As if the above wasn’t annoying enough, there is a complete lack of overview pages describing the details of each corridor and its current status. Those details can only be found by reading the lengthy and multiple reports for each corridor. The only corridor that seems to have an overview page is the Northside-Southside corridor, but that page is only accessible via the lefthand menubar on only the East-West Gateway homepage.
And nowhere to be found are the reports from the Madison County Feasibility Study. That study is only accessible via the site map!
Last words
The lefthand menubar is a complete travesty. It’s different on every single page and, like every other page on the East-West Gateway website, riddled with incorrect, missing, or otherwise broken links. In other words, the East-West Gateway website is a mess and in need of a complete overhaul, yesterday.
