Bloomberg Anachronistically Proposes 311 “Mass Transit Hotline”
The mayoral election season is drawing upon New York City, and it’s time for the candidates to start taking on the causes that will define their election platforms. One of the issues that incumbent mayor Michael Bloomberg is starting to get vocal about a plan to implement MTA reforms, which his campaign website describes as:
A thoughtful, comprehensive 33-part plan that lays out tangible, realistic ideas to help the MTA reduce costs, reduce congestion, speed commutes, improve efficiency, enhance accessibility, and ultimately produce a safer, faster, cleaner, better mass transit system.
As a man whose daily routine has depended heavily on the operations of the MTA (particularly the subway system) for over a decade, this is a concern in which I’ve become heavily invested. I’ve encountered my share of frustrations with the organization’s results, and I frankly have much to say about ways to improve the overall quality of the MTA’s service.
To be sure, I have a number of specific thoughts about various points in this plan, but I’d like to focus on one particular point for the moment: the idea of turning 311 into they city’s “Mass Transit Hotline.”
I’m sorry — a hotline?
The stated goal of this hotline is to provide quick and easy access to transit information, such as service schedules, travel maps, and up-to-date alerts regarding planned and circumstantial service alterations. Indeed this is an important goal, but a phone hotline is honestly probably the one of the least effective possible ways I can think of to accomplish this goal.
Simply put, nobody likes to call in for “phone support” for anything. This is because phone support systems universally suck, for everyone involved.
Now, I do feel like it would be useful to also offer 311 as a source of travel information, but only for people who cannot get it by other means. It could be a valuable new offering for, say, the visually impaired. Or, as a last resort for a person in some other extenuating circumstance. As such, a transit hotline would be more of an accessibility enhancement for transit information.
The fact is there are already a number of ways to access timely transit information that are better and more effective than a call-in hotline. Unfortunately, the average MTA customer has no idea any of them exist.
One example is www.MyMtaAlerts.com. The tool allows registered users to subscribe to service alerts for information about specific subway lines, bus service, and more, which all get delivered to their email inbox, mobile phone, or both. Although there’s plenty of room for improvement, this tool does allow MTA customers to subscribe to important information about the specific parts of the MTA’s vast transportation system that is directly relevant to them, and gets the information into customers’ hands without the customers having to even think about asking after it.
Other tools, including a trip planner, schedule listings, and more, are also available at www.mta.info… provided you actually manage to discover them in the train wreck of a website (yea, I’ll confess: pun fully intended).
The fact that these do exist, however, demonstrates that the MTA is tracking and managing all this information digitally.
So the bottom line here is that, if Bloomberg wishes to make a meaningful difference in getting transit information into the hands of New Yorkers, he’ll have to focus on making this data more accessible.
This broadly boils down to taking the following actions:
Raise public awareness. Promote use of the existing tools in subway PA announcements. Rather than just reminding people that police may randomly search everyone’s bags, or discouraging people from giving money to panhandlers, or to step back from the yellow safety lines as trains enter and leave stations, these messages can encourage people to sign up for email and text message alerts online. Print subway ads. Run TV spots. Feature these tools prominently on MetroCards. This can begin immediately.
Redesign the MTA website. I don’t simply mean tweaking the colors, adding some gradients, and moving to some three-column layout. This site is in dire need of a ground-up rethinking of how it’s organized. Although I have loads of specific criticisms about this site, I’ll save those for a later post. For now, I’ll simply say that the home page needs, at minimum, to directly expose their existing travel tools. This can be pulled off iteratively, over the course of several months.
Expose the transit information via data feeds and Web Service APIs. The MTA is clearly tracking service information digitally, as it’s using it to power both the MyMtaAlerts website, as well as Google Maps’ capability to offer door-to-door travel directions via the MTA’s network. Connecting the infrastructure powering these services to data feeds and web services can allow both the MTA and third party developers to create new web and mobile device applications, designed to meet their customers’ evolving needs. This effort will take the longest of all, but will prove to be an investment that will have created a foundation for continued improvements for MTA customer service.
Having 311 take on the role of “Mass Transit Hotline” in an effort to get New Yorkers timely transit information is an idea would have, quite frankly, been deficient even in the 20th century.
But it’s 2009 now.
Bloomberg and NYC need to look to where government and society are moving. Mobile and web are the only information delivery solutions that can improve today’s commutes, while investing in improving tomorrow’s.
