Don’t Hate Her, She’s Just the (Subway) Messenger
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Re: Don’t Hate Her, She’s Just the (Subway) Messenger
#2I have friends who
have and currently live in NYC and I know the MTA gets a lot of flak from them and sometimes for very good reason.
I have to say though all things considered this is a shining example (to me) of something that is typically very opaque - government agency public relations- and giving it some honest try polish and actually trying to meet people where they are (e.g Twitter)
Does this paper over all the problems of th MTA? I’m sure it does not! I do think they’re at least trying though and that’s a lot more than can be said of other gov agencies I have dealt with.
Re: Don’t Hate Her, She’s Just the (Subway) Messenger
#3I don't get the hate. I just love to have a good information system.
People hating those messages never had to live in countries with failures occurring without any feedback.
Re: Don’t Hate Her, She’s Just the (Subway) Messenger
#4I have friends who have and currently live in NYC and I know the MTA gets a lot of flak from them and sometimes for very good reason. I have to say though all things considered this is a shining example (to me) of something that is typically very opaque - government agency public relations- and giving it some honest try polish and actually trying to meet people where they are (e.g Twitter) Does this paper over all th…
Agreed! Though there are clearly problems, I really appreciate the folks working actively on transparency (of operations, at least). I've been pleasantly surprised at the breadth and depth of my own city's API for real time information, and understand this level of thoughtfulness isn't unusual for major US public transit systems in general.
Re: Don’t Hate Her, She’s Just the (Subway) Messenger
#5I have friends who have and currently live in NYC and I know the MTA gets a lot of flak from them and sometimes for very good reason. I have to say though all things considered this is a shining example (to me) of something that is typically very opaque - government agency public relations- and giving it some honest try polish and actually trying to meet people where they are (e.g Twitter) Does this paper over all th…
The German train system uses TTS in all stations to announce (among other things) delays and cancellations. Cancellations are usually followed by the phrase "we apologize". This has always been for me the most infuriating part: that the fakest of apologies was attached to it.
In contrast, getting actual information about the delay works for me, precisely because it feels more honest.
Re: Don’t Hate Her, She’s Just the (Subway) Messenger
#6One of the feeds she monitors is here: https://twitter.com/NYCTSubway/with_replies
Re: Don’t Hate Her, She’s Just the (Subway) Messenger
#7I checked out their Twitter feed a couple days ago (had to reroute due to a broken rail at Wall St. and wanted to see a picture or something of the broken rail). I was amazed how polite and helpful they are to the most irate customers. It really does seem that the social media team calms down a lot of angry people.
Meanwhile, I am surprised at how desynchronized their various data sources are. I check mta.info before I go on a subway trip, and did that this morning for my commute to work. Delays on the 4 and 5, but none on the 2 and 3. I go down to the 2/3 platform and there is an announcement playing saying that the 2 and 3 are delayed (for the same reason given on mta.info about the 4/5; signal problems at Borough Hall). The website apparently didn't get the message. At least I had cell service while waiting...
Re: Don’t Hate Her, She’s Just the (Subway) Messenger
#8As much as the system might be bad, remember the human behind the service.
Re: Don’t Hate Her, She’s Just the (Subway) Messenger
#9I live in NYC, and I follow transit news very rigorously.
This article underplays the extent of the problem, which is that the information they give is just not actually correct.
First of all, the MTA made a big deal about rolling out the subway countdown clocks across (almost) all the stations. Except, for the old BMT lines[0], the clocks are just... not actually accurate! They're literally just publishing the scheduled times, and almost never actually update it to correspond to a delay[1][2]. Delays are dramatically worse across every single subway line than they were ten years ago[3], so by this point, those scheduled times are almost completely useless. Thankfully, the BMT countdown clocks are a different style from the IRT ones, so as a rule of thumb: if it's black text on white background, then it's completely useless, and if it's green LEDs on black background, then it's probably-somewhat-useful, but still not necessarily up-to-date.
Even for planned service changes, they publish information in unbelievably obtuse ways[4]. Yes, they're technically correct. But the point is to communicate things clearly, not to publish statements that are defensibly not-wrong in a court of law.
Just last month, they decided to stop service for the express trains midtown (or run it in two segments - I never figured out which). They didn't tell anyone, so an entire train full of passengers went two stops downtown and two stops back uptown. Because they also held the train before one of the stations, we literally took half an hour to end up right back where we started[5].
[0] For the most part, any line with a letter instead of a number, like the A/C/E instead of the 1/2/3
[1] https://twitter.com/2AvSagas/status/950863996323794944
[2] https://twitter.com/2AvSagas/status/948727423444639745
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/28/nyregion/subw...
[4] https://twitter.com/2AvSagas/status/933826118364299266
[5] https://twitter.com/chimeracoder/status/1000422530736377857
Re: Don’t Hate Her, She’s Just the (Subway) Messenger
#10[deleted]