One criticism of Metro’s response to last year’s snowpocalypse was the ad-hoc way in which reroutes were improvised. That was addressed by Friday’s rollout of the Emergency Service Network.
The other problem was the difficulty in getting the information out to people who needed it. It may be essentially impossible to deliver timely information to those who aren’t online, but Metro has greatly improved what came before:
- This page has a handy color-coded map of which areas of the county are experiencing reroutes and to what degree that’s the case.
- Metro now lets you sign up for personalized alerts that you can receive by email or SMS. It doesn’t quite have all the bells and whistles I’d desire, but is a great step forward.
With typical luck and timing this was being announced almost simultaneously with Seattle Metro service beiug heavily disrupted by the Officer Bretton memorial procession, with almost no useful and timely information.
The new alert page is a good improvement over the existing system. It would be nice if construction and events were separated out though. Construction is generally long term as where event are short term.
For example WSDOT reports on both events and construction as well but separates them. The user that these systems should target are those that know or are expecting some service disruptions and need the information in a quick and easy manner. Having the events and construction together makes this harder. Also most riders will get information about stop closures at the stop its self, so that information really isn’t as important as say an entire route that is not running.