Along with real-time traffic updates, a new Website, Trips123.com, promises to provide an address-to-address trip planner integrating nearly every major mass-transit system in the tri-state area.

With a battle for capital financing under way and the prospect of a fare increase on nearly everything but the $2 subway base fare, the MTA needed a public-relations boon, and the trip planning site, though still in testing, may be it. The site has been in the works for more than a year and a half. Though it still has not been officially unveiled, all the links are running and ready for use. No one from the MTA or Trips123 returned phone calls from The New York Sun to explain why there had been no announcement.

Development funds came from a coalition, called Transcom, of 18 city, state, and federal transportation and safety agencies. Most of the money came from a federal Department of Transportation grant.

The site comes in three main components: a trip planner, a real-time traffic update system, and a subscriber area.

The trip planner provides the best mass-transit route between any two addresses in New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut. According to the site, some addresses in Putnam, Dutchess, and Orange counties are still being entered.

And while the system found most of the addresses tested by the Sun, some that were less straightforward, like one in a gated community, caused problems.

“Lot’s of times you know where you’re going, but you don’t know which train station is closest,” one Harlem native, Vivian Ojeda, said. She travels often to Queens, a borough she finds “really confusing.” She hopes the new site will help her find her way.

Moreover, the planner can be customized. It offered five different itineraries from the Sun offices on Chambers Street to either La Guardia or JFK Airport using subways, buses, the Long Island Railroad, and the AirTrain.

Indeed, the planner gathers together schedule information for all of the subways, the Long Island Railroad, the Metro-North Railroad, AirTrain, PATH trains, and New Jersey Transit’s railroads and buses. The only schedules not yet worked into the planner are the county bus systems in the suburbs – and those are in the works.

The traffic information works on a clickable map that marks construction sites and accidents, including lane closures. Those are part of the so-called Intelligent Traffic System, which has been installed by city and state DOTs over the last 20 years. Using cameras and sensors set up along roads, bridges, and tunnels, a central information center monitors traffic, updates the Web site, and alerts radio and television outlets that provide traffic reports.

For $5.95 a month, commuters can get traffic updates and rail delays for the lines and roads they select sent to them automatically by e-mail, phone, or text message.

A Planned Activities link allows users to learn of expected or continuing construction activities for roads or mass transit, including subway re-routings, which are often planned weeks or even months ahead.

Although a few technical bugs remain, none seems insurmountable. And the transit directions, while accurate, require translation from subway speak to English. A Manhattan-bound No. 4 train from Brooklyn is written as “MTA NYC TRANSIT/SUB TRAIN #4/WOODLAWN AT 9:18 PM” – comprehensible, but more work than it ought to be.

Users should note from the quote above that the system includes precise times of scheduled arrival for the subway. Though straphangers may be skeptical, the subways do have a schedule they adhere to. And the Web site makes it easy to find.