There are lots of neat reasons to get one of these, but mine is that I want fund auto-loading on a BART card. No more thinking, just swipe and go. Also, less waste. It kills me a little bit every time I put my card in the machine to increase its balance and I get an entirely new card.

Right now Clipper is sending the cards out for free. I am not sure if you need to load it up with anything, but I did, and supposedly they will send it to me in 5 – 7 days. ^_^

I am going to be talking about this a lot in the coming days, because I have a lot to say, so here is a heads up. ^_^

Anyhow, what the hell, transit agencies? Is it not in your best interest to make your customers happy? I know you have people who work there who have mobile phones and use social networks. Isn’t it time to jump on this web 2.0 thing everyone is abuzz about?

I walked around a train platform for thirty minutes yesterday because there was no way for me to know that the train was going to be late before arriving at the station and hearing the automated voice tell me so. Given the extra time I devised a really basic plan involving everyone’s favorite mainstream microblog site.

Amtrak would create a twitter account for general announcements, with a separate account for each line. So I would follow @capitolcorridor and occasionally get a tweet that said something like:

535 SJC Departing Richmond. 11 minutes behind schedule.

or

System delay due to Freight Traffic between Suisun-Fairfield and Martinez.

The updates would go out for each stop, or every ten minutes for system announcements. You could even do it by train number, in which case I would follow @amtrak535 or something similar.

For folks who take the train every weekday this would be great. I only take it once a week, but I know how to type

and

when I need the information. And twitter users know how as well, the service is really easy.

This of course applies to Caltrain as well. SVBC has created a workgroup to discuss “feasible, near-term ways to improve the Caltrain system for passengers who take their bikes aboard trains”. Their setup is similar enough to Amtrak that I think microblogging would work well as a system to notify passengers of system updates, and cyclists of train car capacity (or some other useful information).

Twitter would no doubt be willing to help an agency, since that is a serious sustainable use of their service. Of course, one wouldn’t have to stop there. A crafty IT staff would leverage all kinds of neato technologies to make aggregation of specific train information as simple as texting on a mobile (they could roll their own: Laconica).

I don’t know what would be appropriate for the BART, or if it would improve much by it, but it is worth looking into none the less. At the very least we could use an announcements account.

I haven’t researched if any of these ideas are already happening, so if you know about any tell me. I will keeping a complexity for it at transit information aggregation.

I went into work to go for a meeting with a database specialist who is implementing a CRM type thing for our org. Inspired! It is going well, we are on track, and it is going to change how we do almost everything. What I wasn’t counting on was speaking to the Board of Directors tonight. I was second to last on the agenda, so I got to hang out and hear all the nifty details. It wasn’t boring, per se. Just, a lot of info.

I make this commute with some frequency, about once a month. Basically anytime I have a meeting on the Peninsula. I like listening to music from Ghost in the Shell during this trip. Will folks in the future use multi-modal public transportation to travel hundreds of miles in their daily commutes? Or for leisure?

The Board seems excited for the work I am doing, and are seeing what I see in where we can go with it. This makes me excited, I have their support, and the opportunity to create something elegant and meaningful as an advocacy tool.

I am exhausted.