Today at 7PM I received an alert from the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) about an issue that happened that would impact tomorrow’s morning commuter train commute. They said look for updates before heading for work.
This is not a first and brings up the question ‘Why are they always so reactive with so little process?’ Issues occur that can't be predicted in advance, but flexible response processes can be developed to limit the impact of an issue. This would be an ideal time for them to be proactive and implement a pre-planned reduced schedule. Then leverage social media to get the word out to as many people as possible.
While looking at their social media presence, I found out that they do not monitor their social media 24x7. Do they think that nothing is reported via social media? Or perhaps events, issues or any other news never happens outside of their 9-5 M-F monitoring window.
Of course, the MTA did deploy and e-mail alerting system a couple of years ago. It does work, sort of. Sometimes I receive an alert in time to make a change in plans, other times I receive an alert after I am on the train and stuck because I received the e-mail 20-30 minutes after the issue happened and of course there are times I don't receive an alert.
It is time that the largest public transportation authority wakes up to the new millennium. The world is changing and it’s being documented by social media in real time! Twitter can alert tens of millions of people to a significant world event, yet the MTA can't alert a few thousand people of a canceled train.
Though, I admit that I am being hard on the MTA. Alerting via e-mail doesn't scale very well nor is it very timely. On top of that, the cost of e-mail distribution for the purposes of alerts is huge as it compares to a tweet. So yeah I agree, the MTA will never be able to get alerts working right on e-mails.
Of course I doubt the NYC MTA is much different from any of their peers.
Comments and thoughts are always welcome
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