Photo of the Day, March 15, 2010: Subway Girl
Ólöf Arnalds at T.T. the Bear's
Around the Ist-a-Verse
Sports Redux: March Badness
A Soggy St. Patrick's Day Parade
In a revolutionary development for the MBTA, the organization has decided that it might be nice to tell commuters when trains are arriving. As we all know, some stations already have announcements like "The next Red Line train to Alewife is now approaching," but those announcements usually occur at about the time you can either see or feel the train on its way. It would be nice to know whether your wait will be 5 minutes or 25, and some other cities, like DC and Paris, already have countdown-type systems that work pretty well. There's a "Next Train" countdown feature being planned for commuter rail, and the MBTA will tackle bus alerts after that. Installing individual countdown or update signs at every bus station would be extremely expensive, so the focus is on finding ways to provide phone or PDA alerts. Riders will be able to text their bus route number to the MBTA and get a response indicating scheduled arrival times. We think it'd be nice if we could just, y'know, call an MBTA hotline and get a list of when trains are coming, but maybe that's too high tech.
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Telling us scheduled arrival times will do exactly Jack Shit. It would be nicer to call and have them say, "You might as well stay home and spend the next 10 minutes eating an English muffin, because if you just go to the bus stop now you'll wait and wait and then two 116s, a 117 and a 114 will arrive in a convoy," as happened this morning.
Yeah.. could they please stop making improvements to things that don't need to be improved and then jacking the T fare every other year. The old trains worked better than the new ones, the tokens worked better than the passes, I don't need the buses to be 48 degrees during the summer, and then 104 degrees when the air conditioners are broken because we can't just open the windows anymore.
We don't need to know how late the bus is going to be. Stop making "improvements" and just try having buses and trains run on time, all the time for at a minimal fare.
well, they're adding GPS to the buses, too, so (in theory?) they would be able to have phone operators check on the GPS positioning and tell you how far away / off schedule the buses are. but god knows how long that would take and how much money it would cost to implement.
Yeah, I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that to be seamless and useful.
Have they considered partnering with NextBus, which is quite reliable? If they're already installing the GPS, then NextBus can the times. MIT is already working with them.