Charlottesville city council—suckers much?
March 23rd, 2008 by some dudeWhat the god damn f-ing hell are the people in City Hall thinking? They spend $500,000 on dumb ass GPS units to track the transit system buses? The problem isn’t that we don’t know where the buses are—the problem is that they suck. They don’t run often enough and they don’t stick to their schedule.
Here’s the page where the buses are supposed to be mapped real time. Only works on IE, and you need the Adobe SVG viewer…. REALLY??? A $500,000 system that only works on IE?! IE isn’t supported by Macs. And a quarter of UVA students (and a whole lot of the rest of the population) use Macs. And SVG viewer??? Straight from the Adobe Download site, on the FIRST LINE: “Please note that Adobe has announced that it will discontinue support for Adobe SVG Viewer on January 1, 2009.” Plus, I’m assuming an SVG viewer isn’t going to work any portable internet savvy device (iPhone, crackberry).
They installed little interactive screens at some of the stops, but guess what… they’re only at some of the stops! What the hell good does that do if I’m not at one of those stops?! Even if my stop does have one—great thanks, I trekked out to the bus stop in the rain only to find out that my bus is 20 minutes behind schedule so I get to wait here and get wetter while watching a blinky light taunt me for 20 minutes… because I couldn’t check it before I left my home because I don’t have god damn Internet Explorer.
Here’s a big DUH-UH-UH-UH-UH to the city of Charlottesville on this one.
story and a lot of the links via cvillenews
… I changed my mind, I’m not done. Didn’t Curt (remember Curt, the really smart dude that we worked with that could do anything?)—didn’t he intern for a trucking company and make a system to track their trucks that just used regular old pagers? Definitely didn’t spend $500k on it either. So even if Cville thinks it really really needs a new tracking system, there are way cheaper ways to do it! Ok now I’m done.
March 24th, 2008 at 5:13 am
A.J., Why don’t you tone down the language, then write a letter to the paper, then if you get enough support, you can get somebody (even you) to run against the idiots that did the stupid stuff in the next election, and replace them. Might be interesting to research any connections between the people who made the decision and the people who get the money for the system. That’s usually the first place to look when groups make decisions that look stupid. But on the other hand, sometimes it’s just because they’re stupid. At least that’s been my experience dealing with governments, both here in Japan and in the U.S.
Dad