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.
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.
So on my 1h30m commute home last night I added about 20 new keys to the database. Doing so I was thinking about how many people have actually sent an update so ran some stats (I have also been asked for similar statistics).
There are…
1789 @caltrain followers,
314 @bikecar followers,
2103 total followers (unknown overlap) and
256 (12%) issued keys.
Of those issued keys
146 (57%) have updated at least once,
11 (8%) have updated more than 100 times, and
3 (1%) of you have updated more than 300 times (wow)!
Kinda neat looking back at things over 2 years ago.
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.
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.
Twitter changed the functionality of @-replys somewhat which allows for group like feature. Reading the description it is not immediately obvious if this will be helpful in any way to improve the service.
I’m on a working vacation right now in Boston and NYC so won’t have much time to dig into this until I return on Tuesday.
It is unfortunate to learn about two suicides in as many days (and the first of the year) and it is unfortunateit is this news that brings me to posting at all. @caltrain certainly helped me out on my morning commute today as I suspect it had for others. I had intended an early train but adjusted my schedule after getting the first tweet. This gave me plenty of time to get to 4th and King and get an update of delays. I was able to get a delicious latte from The Creamery and Lactaid from Walgreens to allow for a pleasant gastro experience.
It was nice to also see actual official tweets by a Bay Area transit representative. Official tweets from such entities are prefixed with O: to designate so. I also want to remind everyone of the updating guide and to try to check recent tweet history to prevent too many redundant tweets. Also consider the newsworthiness of the tweet. I don’t censor, edit, or otherwise prohibit content but I want to remind everyone of the 1,200 followers many may be getting SMS updates for each tweet.
In other news I had a phone interview with Sebastian Kunz of Talk 910KNEW / green960 KKGN a few weeks ago to talk about @caltrain and @bikecar. I’m not certain if it made it to air as I was back in Cleveland for several days, but the potential exposure and awareness was cool.
Finally I wanted everyone to know that it is just me running this service so if replies to email for update keys or otherwise take a little while it is either because I am stuck with my real job or out of town. Sometimes I do miss email all together so if its been a long time in getting a reply send a reminder.
Thank you to everyone who has been helping make this as useful as I had imagined it could be.
Bicycle riders should be happy to learn that Caltrain has published the 36 scheduled trains that will be equipped with 2 bike cars for a total capacity of 64 bicycles. “These trains are operated with the stainless steel, fluted-side gallery cars, and the bike cars are the northernmost car and the fourth car from the north.”
I suspect the utility of my service will decline with this new data, however I believe it will still be useful when the trains are configured differently.
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.
I wanted to apologize to a few dozen of you who emailed in for update keys weeks ago. It wasn’t until today that I have had some time to go through the Caltrain mbox and reply to everyone. I also wanted to thank everyone who has been participating in the Caltrian and Bikecar updates. I started the service a little over a year ago after a particularly bad period of delays. It has now gained the support of at least 750 Caltrain riders and 130 who have asked for update keys to help make the service actually useful. I have even gained the attention of the media with the San Mateo Daily Journal being the latest to mention it.
Thanks again,
-r