On Public Transit

Today the train was one minute late. I actually felt like maybe I did something wrong because the train wasn't on time. Did I not check the schedule closely enough? Was my watch wrong? Then the train came at 7:20 instead of 7:19. I still got off at 7:46 like always. At some point between Pepsi Center and Belleview, the cosmos righted itself.

To compare, this is what I escaped. To quote, the Metro is:

just one big, damn, anonymous hurry

This article highlights much of what is wrong with the metro, but didn't even get into the DC subway system's frustrating inability to move people from one stop to another reliably. Just another reason I am happy we escaped.

When will WMATA get one of these?

Was reading Scripting News, by Dave Winer on Google Reader and came across this post that talked about the BART exposing a web API. I immediately wondered if our wonderful friends at WMATA had something like this. I discovered a twitter account apparently updated by the good people at Metrorail. Note that every single entry is 'double-tweeted'. If they can't get simple things like this right, my confidence in their ability to push out a public API wanes quickly. I found this site called meenster, which got rave reviews here, but it doesn't seem to show me very much. I don't know if it is broken temporarily or just completely defunct, but this is what I see for bustling Metro Center:

Not terribly confidence-inspiring news there. Ah well, I guess it was extremely wishful thinking there. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.