If you follow me on Twitter then you know how much I despise Boston’s public transportation system (the MBTA, or “T” as it is disaffectionately known). My commute is just ONE stop on the Red Line (arguably the least crappy service line) and when it is double digit weather out or nicer, I will gladly walk two miles instead of waiting for a train (usually takes longer to take the train anyway) - which unfortunately means that this last few weeks of single-digit hell force me to deal with the T.
This week has been especially painful: waited 25 minutes on Monday morning, no trains Tuesday evening (had to walk in the frigid snow), waited 30 minutes Wednesday morning, train died on the tracks for 10 minutes on Thursday… and this goes on and on. Apparently the MBTA is completely incapable of working properly in the cold… when people need it the most.
Well while waiting YET AGAIN this morning I thought about how great it would be to know what was going on - why are there no trains and how long might it take for one to come? The MBTA offers email and text alerts, but those a) don’t always work and b) sometimes I’m not taking the T… so I don’t always want emails/texts. So I need another way. Normally what I end up doing is pulling out my phone and jumping on to Summize to search Twitter for keywords relating to my commuting struggles.
By searching through Tweets I can normally find someone talking about some sort of fail with the T - it’s a real-time, real life, and unregulated way to get the updates I need. To save myself time, I even made a few shortcuts on my phone for local searches for my keywords (Twitter search for “xxxx Line” near:02110 within:15mi).
And here are my bookmarks for your use - named for each line (mbtaall = “MBTA”):
Now keep in mind that your milage may vary. For example there hasn’t been a whole lot of Tweeting coming out of the Silver or Blue lines… and your bound to get a few false-positives, but the Green and Red have enough volume to get a good sense of why the T has failed.
If you take the MBTA (and I’m sorry if you do) then make your day a little easier by bookmarking the relevant links on your device. It might not make the trains show up any faster - but at least you’ll know your not alone while you wait. Also, if you want more direct alerts - like the TAlerts, but through Twitter - check out the T-Tweet Page that transfors the alerts into tweets.
This is just another example of how Twitter works as a communication platform - connecting people and solving problems. My guess is that this type of functional use is going to drive more Twitter adoption from companies, organizations, and end-users. Twitter is about the gather information from the current moment, faster than any news source can report it - and with five million plus people all talking at once, your bound to find something useful in the global conversation.
