Every semester has that one morning where you are sitting at a bus stop at 8:10 wondering whether you have already missed the class that decides your attendance mark. This planner takes your class schedule and your commute time and tells you exactly when to walk out the door.
Add each class with its day and start time, set how many minutes the trip takes, pick how you travel, and it hands back a departure time for every class plus a weekly total. It works the same whether you walk, bike, take the bus, drive or carpool, because the only thing that changes is the number you give it.
Plan your commute around your class schedule. Enter your classes, commute time, and transportation mode to get departure times and weekly commute hours.
How it works
Start by adding classes one at a time: name, day of the week, start time and end time. Each one shows up in a list under the form so you can check you typed the right room time, and you can remove any entry with its button before you calculate. The tool refuses to add a class whose end time lands before its start time, and it will ask for at least one class before it plans anything.
Then set the commute time per trip in minutes and choose a mode: walking, biking, bus, train or subway, car, or carpool. The mode is a label for your own reading, the arithmetic is the same, so a 45 minute bus ride and a 45 minute walk both cost you 45 minutes.
Press Plan Commute and it walks through the week in order, Monday through Sunday, sorting your classes by start time within each day. For every class you get a departure time, the arrival, when you leave after, and when you are home. At the bottom it adds up two trips per class per week and gives you total commute hours for the week.
Do the arithmetic by hand sometime and you will see it is nothing complicated, which is exactly why it is easy to skip. Departure time is simply the start time minus your commute minutes, and home time is the end time plus the same number. The value of the tool is that it does that for every class on every day before you have had your coffee, and then tells you the weekly bill in hours.
A worked example
Physics 201 runs Monday and Wednesday from 09:00 to 10:00, and the bus takes 25 minutes door to door. The plan reads: depart 08:25, arrive 09:00, leave at 10:00, home by 10:25. Same on Wednesday. Two classes, two round trips, so 100 minutes of your week disappears into the bus, which is 1.7 hours.
Add a lab on Thursday from 14:00 to 17:00 with the same 25 minute trip and the total climbs to 250 minutes, or 4.2 hours a week. Over a 15 week semester that is about 63 hours on the bus, which is roughly eight working days. That number is the useful one, because it is what you are actually choosing between when you schedule an 8am and a 6pm on the same day.
Common mistakes and honest caveats
The common mistake is entering optimistic travel time. Use the time you would actually travel, not the best case at 6am on a Sunday. Check the route at the time your class starts, then add five minutes for the walk from the stop to the building, because the doors lock and the professor does not care.
Back-to-back classes get handled badly by every planner, including this one. It shows departure times per class independently, so if two classes sit ten minutes apart across campus, the plan will tell you to leave before the first one has ended. Read those rows together and fix the conflict yourself.
Also note the weekly total counts each class as a round trip, and it does not know about gaps, detours, or the twenty minutes you spend looking for parking. Treat the total as a floor rather than a ceiling.
Other tools
Once your mornings are sorted, the course load planner helps you decide how many of those early classes to take in the first place, the daily planner pdf lays out the rest of the day, and the daily routine planner builds the whole week around fixed blocks like this one.
Frequently asked questions
How do I estimate my commute time?
Look up the route at the time you would actually leave, then add five to ten minutes for walking, waiting and delays. One number, entered once, applied to every class you add.
What if I have classes on the same day close together?
Both rows show their own departure and arrival times, so compare them directly. If the times overlap or leave you no gap, you are effectively staying on campus between them and the tool will not model that break for you.
Does the mode selection change the math?
No. Walking, biking, bus, train, car and carpool all use the minutes you enter. Pick whichever describes your trip so the heading on the result makes sense when you read it back.
Can I remove a class after adding it?
Yes, each entry in the list has a remove button, and the list updates immediately. Reset clears every class along with the result if you are starting a fresh semester.
Does it remember my schedule?
Nothing is saved between visits, so write down the departure times you care about or print the page before you close the tab.