Dear Metro: Please Twitter
I can’t get enough of this damn Twitter nonsense. How else would I have known that Annika needs to clean her house? That Siel is thinking about making pancakes? That Lucinda got her hair did? It’s fascinating. It’s addictive. It’s ruining my life. I’m even following LAFD on Twitter, so I know every brush fire/hazmat spill/cat stuck in the tree incident as it happens. Which got me thinking… where’s Metro?
Poking around the Twittersphere (sorry), I stumbled upon a dude in London who devised a Tube Tracker. Every 15 minutes his server checks the status of London’s subway system, and sends updates regarding delays to your Twitter account. You can even sign up to get updates on ONE SPECIFIC LINE. A similar tracker exists for BART in San Francisco.
Imagine Metro sending Twitter updates that the Red Line Highland Station is being bypassed for security reasons. That Metro Rapid 720 is running 7 minutes behind schedule. Or that an accident has closed Southbound traffic on the 101 at Coldwater Canyon. Imagine that Twitter update popping up on your cell phone just as your walk out the door to head to work.
Why don’t we already have this?
1:37PM UPDATE:
Look what I found:
Related posts:
We don’t have this because it’s a GREAT IDEA and because the folks at Metro are too busy coming up with ad campaigns demanding Angelenos IMAGINE what we’d like in a mass transit system rather than the MTA actually REALIZING one.
Oh god, those imagine posters are as bad as the Miss Traffic posters. Well, almost as bad.
Metro hating is the new American Apparel hating.
They might not have Twitter yet, but you can sign up for email alerts/updates here: http://www.metro.net/riding_metro/riders_guide/email_alerts.htm. I’m on the list and get tons of alerts ever day yo. If you had the time or interest you could then set up your own Tube Tracker Twitter for Los Angeles.
I was going to suggest that Fred Camino might have an opinion on this, and sure enough–he beat me to it!
I agree with Fred. Emails alerts are something. I just think something more instantaneous like Twitter would be extremely handy.
I also don’t think that I, nor any one else, should have to set this up. This should be a service provided by Metro for the citizens of L.A.
The point here is, if Metro was doing its job for us, sites like MetroRiderLA wouldn’t even need to exist.
I’d be more interested in Metro’s following ME, so if I’m running late, they’d notice and wait a bit.
Dunno bout that. Metro Bus drivers spend enough time on their cellphones as it is…
This wired in on everything is slowly getting us ready for an orwellian world. I am resisting all temptation.
Wait… I missed the "hate American Apparel" bus. Why should I feel this way, and do they have a non-slave labor twitter?
[...] way back on May 8th when I said that Metro should use Twitter to tell us what’s going on with stuff, like train [...]