Friday, August 22, 2008

OHIO/CINNKY: A response to 5chw4r7z...

A response to 5chw4r7z's comment on the Metro being ten minutes late and it "making a good impression."

Right, welcome to the world of the busrider.

Some of us don't have the luxury to worry about impressions.

For some of us, it's a way of life.

Today, for example, I left my house at 930pm (last bus left my house around 944pm), so I could be at work to clock in by midnight, and road a bus for about 1.33 hours to get here at around 11pm, and have just been sitting here for an hour waiting to clock in.

Granted, I have talked about some of the benefits of riding before, and I do enjoy it sometimes.

But, for a huge amount of people in the city, those 10 minutes really screw up our day.

And I swear to you that the streetcar will not solve this problem.


Re this advertising campaign -- I really really like it, but I don't think it's all that aggressive in terms of placement. I mean, it's great that bus riders get to sit there and see these signs and think, "god, I'm saving so much money, but where the fuck is that bus," but how saturated is this message?

UPDATE: I did resist, initially, the urge to make the joke: "Gas is high, but are you?" as a commentary on the state of one of my fellow bus riders this evening, but I just couldn't. It was too funny.


Also, how hard is it for them to do the GPS on bus things so we can check for where the bus is, like they do with COTA in Columbus (one of the nicest things I've ever seen)? In fact, Metro could take a hint from COTA and update their technology a lot to be similar.

3 comments:

Kelly said...

Another cool thing COTA does is link their schedule to Google Maps. If you map out a route in the city, you get the chance to select "by public transit" in addition to "by car" or "walking." Metro's in-house trip planner took me a few tries to give me a route; I already know how to use Google Maps, so I got a COTA route on the first try.

(Sorry - I just found this out yesterday and I'm still a little geeked about it!)

Anonymous said...

Haha, I've read about the COTA trip-planner as well, but never used it yet. Metro could use that, cuz I've heard numerous horror stories about theirs...

COTA always tends to be impressive. We (Cincinnati Transit Historical Assn.) own an old bus from COTA that ran in 30+ years of revenue service and still is in fabulous shape! We bought it directly from them when it got retired in '98 and never have restored it... just maintained it!

Anonymous said...

Mertro does have a GPS system to track the accuracy of bus arrival and departure times. They do this to see how they need to adjust schedules over time.

It's not used for you to be able to track where the hell your late bus is tho. I've lived through that frustration many times.