Metro is unveiling a new adverse weather alert paradigm. A rollout during a weekend storm gives them a chance to work out a the kinks without the pressure of a weekday morning commute.
There will be a twitter feed, allowing low-bandwidth dissemination of information to a wide range of mobile devices. However, in the past the bottleneck has been a lack of bandwidth for hundreds of drivers improvising reroutes to alert headquarters about these ad hoc changes.
To solve this problem, Metro is going to leverage the King County alert blog for this purpose. The idea is that riders can comment on blog entries, thus alerting other riders to what’s going on with their route. After all, the bandwidth of commercial cellular systems far exceeds what Metro has, and it’s probably best to have a more official place for this than an STB snow day thread.
This is all a stopgap before the arrival of bus GPS, but with the budget situation what it is that might be a while. This is a creative way for Metro to collect information, and I’m proud to say that this blog and its readers helped to point the way.
I’m curious how the twitter feed will work to actually disseminate information about buses – so far, they just seem to be talking about sightings of snow.
It also seems like the updater of the twitter account, at least, is in the KC Office of Information Resource Management, and not directly located in metro itself. Don’t know if that matters, but something to note.
Oh, and there are also updaters who are communications people at King County
I’d be just be happy if the person or persons who’s job it is to update the adverse weather page was more on the ball.
The 271 is on snow route “A”, but this is not mentioned on Metro’s website. I also believe the 253’s and 230’s are using Bel-Red Road to 116th, instead of using NE 8th. There is a special shuttle, though, operating along 8th from BTC to Crossroads. This also isn’t mentioned on Metro’s website as of this writing. Where’s the person who updates Metro’s adverse weather page?
Look at Metro’s Adverse Weather link again. Some of that info is there. You just have to hit refresh every time you visit. Plus, things are really changing quickly over here on the Eastside. Probably every bus trip on a single route like the 271 is doing something different tonight as the squalls pass through.
I did refresh before I posted my comment, but update is there now, I see. I’m impressed!
Are you picking this detailed transit info on a scanner?
LB, yes, I have a scanner.
So, seeing how Metro is using their twitter service so far, it seems its updates on snow sightings that it’s heard about and references to the metro adverse weather page. Which is fine, but doesn’t add much to what it had before, except perhaps some good will that it’s actually trying to communicate to the public. I think something more useful FOR METRO would be to encourage users to tweet when and where their bus is on reroute – because that seems to be the information that they don’t really know. However, that seems unlikely to happen – I doubt Metro would want to admit that they don’t know where their buses are all the time.
I don’t think there were a lot of bus disruptions last night or this morning to report. Every time I checked that adverse weather page — after refreshing my browser of course — there was new info. Even this morning at 5:30, they were updating.
Agreed – but I’m betting there was information that was missing at some point. This was a small event – the last weekday snow, for example, Metro had no idea which buses were on reroute. Using Twitter (or looking at something like STB, or if their blog picks up in readership, look at the comments there), they could’ve figured out where some of them were.
i’m not convinced metro twittering is really going to do much other than put a cheap p.r. sheen on the fact that they don’t know what’s going on
the main issue is people want to know when (or if) their bus is going to arrive at their stop. there is still a gross information deficit here.
They can fix the bandwidth issue by working with a firm like http://www.akamai.com.
Akamai puts servers in each network provider’s data center so most of the data transimission is inside the cell or brodband providers network. The network provider’s view this as a someting that reduces thier costs and I don’t think they are for internal bandwidth use. This normally means that using Akamai reduces real server load and thier fees are lower than bandwidth a server costs on the other end.
Microsoft uses them to reduce costs, I’m not sure what the cost/benefits for metro would be but it would be worth suggesting they investigate it.
It’s a not a bandwidth limitation in their internet infrastructure, it’s a problem that they have only so many radio channels and so many drivers that have to communicate changes simultaneously.
Any solution that costs time and money isn’t worth it because GPS tracking is coming soon. In the meantime, leveraging the knowledge that riders have is a reasonable stopgap.
I think this has been mentioned before… but why can’t Metro have its DRIVERS use SMS or Twitter to alert them when going on a reroute? All the driver would need to do is use the cell phone that so many of them already have, and simply pause for an extra 60 seconds at a bus stop before pulling back out into traffic.
Their press release states: “…bus riders will also be able to use the blog to share their own experiences and observations related to bus travel.”
However, it seems that their blog has moderated comments that must be approved before going live. It will be interesting to see if this will always be the case and, if so, how it will impact the usefulness of the site. Right now there’s only one real comment across the 10 postings on the the blog ( http://kingcountynews.wordpress.com/ ).
Yes, I noticed that too – doesn’t seem like it would fulfill what Martin outlined above.
stinkbug – I always seem to agree with you on STB and slog. Just sayin’