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Quick Blopic: There is no point in spending the $$ on public-access information, if there’s no commitment to using it for timely information.
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So we had this transit strike over October – November 2003 here in LA (The MTA bus system). Wouldn’t you know it, I’d moved to downtown L.A. just a few months earlier.

“Your mission, should you decide you need to pay the rent, is to get to your temp assignment, through alternate means. Thank you, Jim. This MTA advisory will self destruct in –“

I actually was one of the fortunate ones. I could take the express line to Santa Monica and use their system to get to work. Took me three times as long that way, but it worked.

It wasn’t to work that was the issue. It was getting back. Miss that express and get stranded 15 miles from your room! Fun fun.

That was the question the first night home. I knew that express ended service awfully early. So imagine my interest when I saw those computer kiosks that the Santa Monica “Big Blue Bus” (nice to see a municipal department with a sense of humor) had set up along Santa Monica Blvd. in their downtown district.

The bus information kiosks are these bulky brushed-steel housings containing touch-screen interactive displays.

Hah!

Canned transit schedules and maps. Guides to local attractions. No evidence whatsoever that the hard drive lounging behind half an inch of streetlife - proof lexan ever had any information updated on it more recently than a couple of months previous. Certainly no news about the freaking transit strike that was immobilizing 400,000+ people that day.

Grr.

Kids, if you’re ever in charge of budgeting for any sort of public access information system, please commit to spending the money so it actually makes sense. Why put a web browser on a corner unless you intend to send content to it?

A transit blog wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Particularly if it was combined with a GPS “here the buses be” interface.

“But if things are going on schedule, who’d bother, or have time to read, anything about the bus system?” goeth one objection.

1. Things don’t always go on schedule.
2. Maybe this is a new model for promulgating an organization’s official views. Everyone’s a publisher, so publish and sell your views!

Seriously. What’s the point in deploying interactive technology if you just use it to store files on a hard drive? Push news at it. Make someone responsible to update the thing and everyone wins.

Thus endeth the lesson.

13-Jan-04