MTA offers new service advisory e-mail program

When torrential rain knocked out the subways in August, the MTA’s communications problems were laid bare for all to see. The station agents and other MTA employees, we learned, didn’t really know what to do, and the MTA’s servers couldn’t handle the crush of people looking for information about the subways.

Well, last week, the MTA began to combat this communications problem by unveiling a new offering: an expanding weekday e-mail service alert program. Called Know Before You Go!, this enthusiastically titled program covers the same ground as one currently offered by weekend service. Sign up for alerts on one line, multiple lines or simply all of them, and you’ll get an e-mail with the latest information about service along that line.

“The ongoing capital infrastructure rehabilitation and system upgrade projects taking place during the day, at night and on weekends is critical to our ability to provide safe and reliable subway service,” MTA NYC Transit President Howard H. Roberts, Jr., said in a press release. “Our weekend e-mail program has been very well received by riders and we expect this new service will be just as if not more popular with our customers.”

The new service — available here for all of you eager beavers — offers subscribers a once-a-week e-mail with the planned changes to the normal weekday subway service. The e-mail will arrive in your inbox on Friday.

And therein lies the cloud to this silver lining. Now, I’m all for the MTA using newfangled technologies like the Internets and electronic mail to send out status alerts. But weekly alerts sent the Friday before serve a fairly limited purpose. The communications problems in August were due to the fact that the MTA had no real-time service available for pushing out service alerts to users on the go. While this new e-mail alert system seems flashy, it doesn’t offer anything beyond planned outages. We need to know about unplanned outages.

We know the MTA wants to develop a platform for real-time text message updates. Even though the stations are not yet wired for wireless, text message alerts would benefit enough cell phone, Blackberry and iPhone users to make a difference. Know Before You Go! is a nice stop-gap, but that’s all that it is. While progress should be applauded, hopefully, we’ll see those real-time alerts before another system-wide outage hits.