At Streetsblog Network member
blog Planning
Pool, this week is being billed as "Fail Week" -- a full five days
on "information about bad planning, lack of planning, and planning
generally gone awry." We can't wait to see what they'll be doing.
There's certainly no shortage of potential topics.
Their first fail-related post actually has to do with a success of
sorts -- the use of Twitter to highlight problems in transit:
One of the more complicatedaspects of Twitter are hashtags. Hashtags are words preceded by the hash symbol, #, like #transitFAIL.The purpose of a hashtag is to organize information and people. They areoften used to Tweet about current events, conferences, quotes,activities, memes, and other things. Mashable has agood explanation about how they work.…
One of my favorite planning-related hashtags is #transitFAIL.The purpose of #transitFAIL is to publicize where public transportationfails its customers and users. It’s a particularly effective tool,because you can use SMS messaging or use a web-enabled smartphone toinstantaneously tell the world about how transit just let you down.Some smartphones can even take photos or videos and upload them toTwitter, too.
Smart transit providers will use this feedback to improve theirservice and see where the problems are. I’d like to see transitproviders use Twitter to notify people about service changes or delays,too.
I didn't know about the #transitFAIL hashtag, but it's a good idea
(we actually used "transitfail" as a tag in Flickr when we were putting
together this
user-generated slide show on lousy transit). Some transit agencies
are using Twitter for service delays as well -- @NYCTSubwayScoop is an
example. Will this ever evolve into standard practice? Should it? Or is
the reach too narrow?
If you know of more good transit-related uses of Twitter, drop them
in the comments.
Oh, and we're @streetsblog,
in case you want to follow us.
