I would give my right arm for a decent alerting system from the MTA in New York. I get into the subway during rush hour probably once every two months to find out that there is some delay or service disruption that causes me to completely re-route, or even walk to work. Short email alerts that I could route to an SMS email address, or even the email client on my cell phone, would alert me to trouble before I got to the train.
Seems like the DC Metro is already doing this. I’m going to test that out over the next few weeks and see what the alerts look like. If you’ve used this service, I’d like to hear your comments.
To add salt to the wound, the MTA recently released a podcast service to provide news and service advisories. While podcasts should typically be subscription-based, I’m curious as to whether these will actually have follow-up casts, or whether they are a one-shot deal. The weekend service advisories might be somewhat useful, but I can get that already in a format I prefer — email. And anyone who has access to a podcast would definitely have access to email. In my opinion, this is a wasted effort, in terms of time and costs of producing and marketing these podcasts. Besides, podcasts are not real-time, especially for an iPod. They have to be downloaded from the Internet when you are syncing the device. I can’t get to that info when I’m entering the subway station.
Real time information, ladies and gentlemen, that is what I’m after.
