Google FAIL

Posted by on . 5 comments.

I’m trying really, really hard to understand why WMATA might not want to participate in Google Transit. And I’m failing. This is incredibly boneheaded. There are no words.

Go read Greater Greater on the subject, and sign their petition.

Comments

  1. digamma says:
    December 14, 2008 at 9:07 pm

    I’d imagine their in-house geeks think they can do a better job and don’t feel like doing the extra work to export the data to Google (which I believe they’re legally obliged to do – at least MTA-NYCT is.)

  2. low-tech cyclist says:
    December 14, 2008 at 9:44 pm

    It’s hard to imagine that WMATA’s geeks think they can outdo Google. That would be like some Division III college QB thinking he could outduel Peyton Manning.

    My guess is they just don’t want to do the work.

  3. mcator says:
    December 15, 2008 at 6:23 am

    Maybe they want to force their customers to learn how to read a bus schedule and a map. Both of these skills can make you a more adept user of transit.

  4. monkeyrotica says:
    December 15, 2008 at 11:32 am

    Typical top-down bureaucratic stovepipe. Not-invented-here syndrome. They sunk a bunch of change into a new website that’s counterintuitive and just a flashy host for .pdf files. Transit data can be fed live, yet they’re still stuck pushing Acrobat files. Just trying to find which bus leaves which station at a given time is a bewildering ordeal. Pushing all that data via Google would probably put fifty WMATA people out of a job.

  5. low-tech cyclist says:
    December 15, 2008 at 4:16 pm

    Maybe they want to force their customers to learn how to read a bus schedule and a map. Both of these skills can make you a more adept user of transit.

    Or you could go to Google Transit, find out where and when you need to grab a bus or train to get to your destination at the desired time, and where you need to transfer.

    I used to teach my pre-calc students how to do interpolation on trig and log tables. I was glad to kiss that era goodbye.

    Not to mention, both bus schedules and transit maps are a pain in the patoot to find, and if you don’t have ‘em, you can’t use ‘em. Put ‘em all on Google.