I Wish...
Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that we caught wind of a rumor that the NextMuni website is headed for an upgrade in the very near future. Ooh, that would be lovely news, wouldn't it? It sure would be swell if all of the electric lines suddenly became available on the site. What a dandy state of affairs. Huzzah.
However. That's not to say that NextMuni's work would be done. Oh hell no. There's still a boatload of fixer-upperring to be done on that site. (The graphic design alone looks like something we cobbled together with Frontpage in 1997. Compare that to the shiny web-2.0ey goodness of Boston's MBTA.)
So, readers. If this strictly hypothetical upgrade were to happen in the next few days, and you were in charge of getting the word out, designing methods for presenting the new NextMuni data to riders, and generally sprucing up the website, what would you do? What's on your NextMuni wish list? Here's ours:
- Communication. Feedback. Not a form that gobbles up messages and never responds, but a forum for riders to communicate back-and-forth with the NextMuni team. An engineering blog would be ideal.
- A map of where all the LED prediction signs are, and a schedule of when each stop is going to be getting its prediction sign.
- A text-message-based predictor, allowing riders to get arrival predictions for any stop without needing an LED display. At each Muni stop, there'd be a note on the Muni map that says, "For this stop's arrival predictions, text '18th & Castro, East' to 415-Next-MTA." That way, you can get predictions for stops that don't have an LED sign, and you can get a prediction if you're at a store or a bar down the street from a stop.
- It's been said that the arrival times may be "stale" by up to five minutes. If that's the case, the website should let riders know. The NextMuni page has a note below the times that says "Valid as of 4:27 PM Monday, March 5" ... it would be great if the arrival estimates on the map had a similar time stamp, so users know how old the numbers are.
After the jump: Invisible buses, XML-scraping for home brew hacks, and a secret list!
- An engineer asks that Muni provide API-like information for developers. He writes, "I'd like to know how links like this work: 'http://www.nextbus.com/s/COM.NextBus.Servlets.XMLFeed?
command=vehicleLocations&a=sf-muni&r=22&t=0&key=1947645158130' and how to go about getting XML data for routes and bus predictions. ... I think there is something similar to nextbus in Seattle, but they allow anyone to make a SOAP call to get bus predictions. There is a cool site called busmonster.com that makes use of this. And interestingly, looking through code from nextbus.com, it looks like they use code from the guy who runs busmonster.com!"
- There should be prediction signs at the entrance to underground stations, not on the platform. With the signs on the platform, you have to go all the way down to see if there's a train coming. But if they were at the entrance, riders would know whether or not it's worth their time to enter the station.
- The LED signs in the Metro stations should have arrival times on them more frequently. Currently, arrival times only appear on those platform LEDs about 10% of the time. The rest of the time, they've got lengthy messages about proofs of purchase, about giving up seats for the disabled, and even promises that the signs will offer up arrival info ... but you've got to stare at them for five minutes if you want to catch the fleeting prediction message."
- The Nextbus display in the subway windows (the Javascript-based map) is very hard for riders to understand. You have to study it to figure out how long you'll be waiting. The maps should be zoomed in closer to the individual station, so that the trains don't all look like they're on top of each other. And there should be a big "NEXT TRAIN" indicator that doesn't care about which line it is -- many riders are just traveling between Church and Embarcadero, and don't care whether it's an N or a J. They just want to know when the next train is coming. Currently, they have to sift through about six different numbers to figure it out.
- NextBus suffers from "invisible" buses now and then: buses that don't show up on the map, but are in fact out doing their runs. That needs to stop. When riders call the information line to get a prediction, the person on the other end usually compensates for "invisibles" by manually checking a list of which buses are out doing their runs. That list exists independently of NextMuni, and though it isn't able to track the current location of the buses, it does verify that a bus is in fact out driving around. The existence of that list is not widely known among riders. And even though the "secret" list doesn't offer arrival estimates, it is still useful for riders to know that when the GPS system is predicting a 30 minute wait, the wait might actually be more like 15. It's hard to say how that information could be presented on the NextMuni site, but it's useful and valuable, so a way should be found to make it available to riders.
- The NextMuni website should have a "report bunching" button that sends an alert to the Dispatch office, so that the drivers can be radioed and told to space themselves out more evenly. Currently, bunching is habitual and chronic, and it seems as though nobody is monitoring the GPS maps to correct it. Dispatch can coordinate evening-out; for example, if the gap is ahead of the bunching, Dispatch can tell the first bus to unload all of its passengers onto the second bus and drive ahead to fill in a gap; or if the gap is behind the bunching, Dispatch could tell the first bus to wait for the second bus, accept the second bus' passengers, and the second bus to wait for a few minutes to close the trailing gap. Thinking about this is so complicated that it makes most folks' heads hurt, but the bunching is even more painful.