“ Talking about the city’s “Transit Tracker” program, which allows people to get real-time info on bus arrivals via their cell phones, Hansen mentioned a study that had been done in the U.K. of a similar program. What was noteworthy was that people using the service felt that the bus service itself had improved, that more buses were running, that they were running closer to schedule, even though none of this was empirically true.
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I seem to link to the Traffic blog a lot, but this one bears a very direct lesson for WMATA (one that I’m sure they’d ignore and/or attempt to explain away). For some reason WMATA appears to believe very strongly that providing this sort of information will make them look bad - they had a demo of a similar service called NextBus and rather than expand it they took it offline for no good reason. Maybe they should reconsider.
How We Drive, the Blog of Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic » Blog Archive » The Enigma of Arrivals
