September 21st, 2009 ravi
When I created the service 3 years ago I tried to think of what I as a commuter (with or without a bicycle) would find useful in a tweet. Talking with fellow riders I came up with the current Updating Guide because it seemed to just make sense. Since the inception of the service the nomenclature in the guide has worked without issue up until recently.
As you may know I don’t alter the content of tweets other than limit to a certain length to be able to append time stamps. I believe that the community should be able to take my idea and initial set of guidelines and mold them to what really works. It is with that belief I felt the service would evolve in a positive and useful way as Caltrain changed its service. That is why I called them guidelines. As it turned out everyone embraced them and felt they met the needs of the majority and as a result essentially became the rule more than a guide.
Recently the use of ‘bombardier’ and ‘gallery’ for car type and ‘limited’ and ‘bbullet’ for service type have been used with greater frequency to the frustration of many people. This frustration has taken form in emails directly to me and to what amounts as a flame war on the public feed where hundreds of people follow. Also it appears users have been editorializing, not consolidating multiple status in 1 tweet, and updating with no useful content.
It is because I received multiple direct emails from users saying, “decreasing the usefulness of the service”, “poor low signal to noise ratio”, and “tweets have taken over my twitter feed on a number of occasions [...] tweeting at length and uselessly about train type, sometimes with editorial comments, and doesn’t use the established conventions” that I realized I cannot take a complete laissez-faire attitude if I have any expectations of the service remaining useful.
It is because of this that I must now insist people adhere to the Updating Guide for updates. The community has embraced my vision and has been very vocal about sticking with it. Also the Updating Guide says at the very top,
What makes an update useful or helpful? No matter what, updates need to be newsworthy and concise. If things are normal or how they should be there is no reason to announce it. Think of this service as a EAS for Caltrain. Too many updates could cause frustration or desensitize users who may stop following or updating which hurts everyone in the long run.
I cannot help but to wonder why people insist on ignoring this fundamental belief.
One approach moving forward I had was replacing any instance of ‘bombardier’ with ‘new’ and ‘gallery’ with ‘old’ before sent to Twitter. ‘Limited’ and ‘bbullet’ would also be removed because the service type is encoded in the route number itself. As stated before:
1 = Local
2 = Limited
3 = Baby Bullet
In fact the direction (NB and SB) is also included — odd routes are Northbound and even routes are Southbound, but I am willing to allow the extra notation there.
But Ravi, you’re being hypocritical!
Yes, but this is why — I want the service to be easy for everyone. It wasn’t until 3 years did I find out the direction and service encoding and it was because someone told me. I suspect I’m not alone. Also I know countless people who outright refused to “ride the old trains.” Not my words but theirs. What is an old train here? Yep, a gallery. I didn’t make it up. It is what it is.
So lets re-recap:
- Stick with the Updating Gude — drop the use of ‘bombardier’, ‘gallery’, ‘limited’ and ‘bbullet’ from the update.
- Consolidate your tweets.
- Keep your editorials to your blog or own Twitter feed. Some people subscribe to SMS updates of the feeds and some of those people pay for each SMS. Consider checking the feed for recent updates before you send one and ask yourself if it meets the criteria I set forth in the Updating Guide.
I am saddened that I even had to write this post, but I am thrilled it took this long before I had to. As hope everyone understands and realigns their updates with the Updating Guide and the requests of the community. Posts will remain unedited (aside from length) and will remain for as long as people respect the service and others.
Posted in @bikecar, @caltrain, Tutorial | 9 Comments »
August 18th, 2009 ravi
Well not really, but I will be going on holiday 8/21 through 9/12 and will probably be punched in the face when I acclimate back to PST. While I will be checking email I won’t be adding new requests for keys. This shouldn’t be too much of a problem as I typically batch them once or twice a month.
In other news while getting on SB236 I noticed a new sign (left) at the end of the cab car noting how many bike cars were in that train configuration. Am I slow on the uptake or is this brand spankin’ new? I didn’t see a similar sign on the engine but didn’t look very hard. Assuming this is actually updated regularly it should be trivial for someone at a terminal to note the configurations early in the morning and do a mass update.
Hmm, and while reading through the tweet history I found this Aug 11 tweet noting the new signs. I guess I have been in the dark.
Finally a few people have asked me if posting guidelines have changed. No they have not. What do I mean?
Please remember:
- Leave the editorial comments to your own feed
- Please use OLD and NEW notation when referring to gallery and bombardier respectively. Not everyone knows the difference and it will just eat up on the maximum character limit you have. Fellow contributors have asked that people follow this to no avail. I am now asking everyone. Please do this do I don’t have to do message pre-processing.
- Please omit the class of service (e.g. bullet, limited, local). As noted by a contributor this is encoded in the train number. The first digit represents the class where 3 is bullet, 2 is limited, and 1 is local.
- Timestamps at the end of each tweet are inserted by me. There is no need to manually add it as it will eat into your max tweet length and cause confusion for others.
- Please keep the tweet to the account it belongs in. Car configurations belong in @bikecar
- Only update when there is something to say. A train that is on time or even <5 minutes behind schedule is not news.
As always I want to thank everyone for contributing and helping out. Remember this will only be successful if people play by the rules. I don’t have many at all so please stick with them. If you have concerns about them or anything I’ve said please do not hesitate to contact me.
Posted in @bikecar, @caltrain, Announcement | 7 Comments »
July 29th, 2009 ravi
Mike Rosenberg, a reporter of the San Mateo County Times/Bay Area News Group, wrote a nice piece about the service that available at the Mercury News and Inside Bay Area. It should also appear in tomorrow’s edition of the Palo Alto Daily News.
I also have a large (15-20) batch of keys I need to generate and mail out so if you requested one it should be sent out shortly.
Posted in @caltrain, Announcement | 6 Comments »
July 15th, 2009 ravi
I have a meeting at 10AM today and so I hopped on SB232 which would place me in Mountain View with time to spare. This would be true if a train wasn’t disabled near Belmont. Now I’m not a train engineer or know what it takes to route trains around incidents in a safe way, but it seems absolutely ridiculous h0w poorly Caltrain has been communicating the delays.
What is even more ridiculous is the back to back issues Caltrain has had. The constant breakdowns of trains conjures an image of maintenance workers whose voices sound like they have gravel in their throats chewing a stub of a unlit cigar covered in grease. I can imagine them looking at each other as a new repair is pushed into the depot and they dig into what is nothing short of a junk pile of miscellaneous parts and combined with some chewing gum and duct tape mend the poor dilapidated train into a condition where it can leave on its own power only later to gasp its last burst of power.
This can’t possibly be the case, right? I say this because Caltrain spent $140 million dollars on “repair and maintenance buildings, a state-of-the-art control center to direct and monitor train traffic, and storage yards for Caltrain’s fleet of locomotives and passenger cars.”
Actually the same page (which now returns a 404) also says “Caltrain will have on-site fuel storage, which will reduce fuel expenses” yet with the last fare increases they cite rising gas prices. And of a personal annoyance is the announcement of a “new train washer that will allow trains to get a thorough cleaning every day. Currently, crews are only able to give trains a thorough washing and scrubbing twice a year.” This would be great if they utilized this new ability, but just about every train I am on has windows so filthy I can barely see out the window. I even wrote feedback to Caltrain about it and they couldn’t bother to send a reply that they even got the feedback let alone what, if anything, they would do to address my issue.
Well, I’ve gotten to the point of rant fueled by rage and to make matters worse I’m on a conference call I want nothing to do with. And SB332 will end up about 45m behind schedule when all things are done.
What is the lesson learned here? Stop going into the office.
Posted in @caltrain, Commentary, Fail | 1 Comment »
July 8th, 2009 ravi
The last month has been a punch to the face for me work wise and I’ve fallen behind in generating keys for people and for that I am sorry. I hope to get some things off my plate and spend some time doing so on my commute this week so be patient.
I had a few small outages with my server in the past few months. Some were self inflicted and others are still unknown. It was because of this that I realized I need to establish a backup system that will process email updates if the primary goes down. I’m not really sure how to do this per se other than some Postfix and MySQL magic. I have the infrastructure just not the time.
Edit: And no sooner did I post did was there another fatality.
Posted in @caltrain, Fail | 2 Comments »
June 18th, 2009 ravi
What a morning, huh? It is fortunate there was no loss of life this morning but it seemed to impact service just as bad if not more so. I found it amusing that a day after I was talking to a friend about the service there was an incident where so many of the pros and cons were highlighted. That said here are a few tips, reminders, and requests which will hopefully help to continue to make this service useful.
1) Check @caltrain before you send your tweet.
Don’t get me wrong here — everyone who is contributing rocks and I’ve been spared a long and painful commute many times because of everyone who gets up hours before me, but checking recent tweets will reduce duplicate messages.
2) Take note of the received time stamp
The addition of the time stamp [HH:MM] is automatically appended to all received updates and will help to put the tweet in context. This was particularly handy this morning where there was as much as a hour delay from when the update was sent to Twitter and when the SMS was received
3) Gift horse getting what he paid for… or cliché du jour
I wanted to defend the tweets from the transit authority this morning. I think it is absolutely fabulous that there are such updates and use them to supplement the more to the minute, live feed from passengers on the train. I won’t pretend to know the chain of command that is involved with getting the official tweets sent, but I suspect these are average delays at a particular moment in time. As a rider one should factor the time when the update is sent with other surrounding updates.
4) Just the facts, ma’am
Please refrain from editorial tweets and stay on topic. In case you forgot have a look at the updating guide.
Posted in @caltrain, Commentary | 5 Comments »
January 12th, 2009 ravi
A rider used @caltrain this evening to send a SOS for a left bag and sure enough someone came through. How cool is that? Certainly a lot better than my failed attempt to recover my keys.
Posted in @caltrain, Misc | 2 Comments »
December 5th, 2008 ravi
A representative from one of the Bay Area transit providers has been providing updates to the service for some time now. You may have noticed them as the ones full of information such as
NB227 and NB230 delayed. NB STOPPED: 233@Lawrence-255 near Bayshore- 231@SM – 135@SJD
No NB trains operating at this time. SB134, 332 and 230 op as locals & reduced speeds.
VTA is accepting all Caltrain fare media on their El Camino Real bus routes.
SamTrans will accept all Caltrain fare media on all buses for the remainder of the service day
As a gesture of apology, all rides on Caltrain will be free until 1:30 a.m., Dec. 5.
Moving forward authoritative or official tweets of this nature will be prefixed with O: to indicate this. The Thanksgiving break got in the way of rolling this out earlier.
In other news another contributor noted the train numbers encode the type and direction of service. 1xx is for local, 2xx for limited, and 3xx is for baby bullet. Even routes are for southbound and odd are for northbound trains. I will update the Guide to reflect this and and will be removing and NB and/or SB labels from updates to reduce tweet sizes.
Also a few notes and reminders about the service to remember: First, the @caltrain and @bikecar accounts are not monitored so to speak. I currently do not review any @replies so don’t be offended for the lack of interactivity if you ask questions or try to send updates via this method and are ignored. Second, the service is not operated by any transit authority and the majority of the updates are provided by commuters. And finally, I have been keeping hands off approach with the updates and only have had to guide a few contributors so far. I suspect many of the followers have enabled SMS updates (I have) so please consider the newsworthiness of your update. With that in mind please try to omit editorializing or including irrelevant content.
And finally I strolled to 4th and King this morning gambling that service would have been restored after the signal system failure. I ended up being interviewed by KTVU since I was just working on a bench while I waited for the next MUNI to stop by to take me home. They actually put my ugly mug on the 5 o’clock news and used my sound bite as the lead to the story. I plugged this service off camera too.
Posted in @caltrain, Announcement | 1 Comment »
October 30th, 2008 ravi
Caltrain wins.
KCRA reported at 5:59PDT a incident with a truck and 12m later the @caltrain feed warmed up to a steady stream of updates about track status, train routing, and departures. While at first I regretted enabling SMS updates for @caltrain because of it waking me up early and keeping me up, I was able to make alternative plans and ended up carpooling with a friend.
I thought it was amusing to read on a list I am on at 7:52PDT
At 4th/King and there are a hundred or so people waiting for multiple
trains. No info on what’s up.
Only to be followed up 8 minutes later with
The CalTrain Twitter feed says there’s a train v. truck in San Mateo,
initially at 9th, finally stopped at 5th. http://twitter.com/caltrain
I don’t know about you but does anyone else think it is strange that at a Caltrain terminal this person didn’t know what was going on? It would be one thing if it were a unstaffed station, but it is unfortunate it was not clear to what was going on at 4th/King.
I would like to thank everyone again who updaes to make the feed useful to many.
Posted in @caltrain, Commentary, Fail | No Comments »