1 September 2005
America, the Beacon
It's good to see that when faced with terrible adversity, Americans are pulling together and responding... by looting hospitals and taking potshots at rescue helicopters.
I'm so proud.
8 May 2004
Public Transit: The Good, The Bad
Nextbus is cool. It’s a service that provides real-time arrival information for selected lines on a variety of public transportation systems, including San Francisco’s. Very straight-forward design, and very handy for deciding if you have time to continue to find that book you wanted to take to work.
To quibble, it should support more bus lines than it does. It focuses on high-frequency lines, but it’s the low-frequency lines where you really need this information . . . if a bus only comes once every 20 minutes during the day, you want to be sure you’re on it. Technology is not perfect, and sometimes a bus will appear that wasn’t on the schedule. But it’s still very useful.
Before I moved to London in 2000, I lived on TransitInfo. The information was cleanly presented and easy to find. The clickable BART schedule map was particularly nifty. No flashy graphics or designer-ego-enhancements, just straight-forward transit information.
By the time I moved back in 2001, it sucked. Layers upon layers of clicks, gratuitous hierarchical menus, pull-downs, and typing. No clickable maps. Lots of dead-end navigation (“this section is under construction” . . . it couldn’t be more 1997 if it had that little yellow men-working sign). This is what happens when a bloated, moribund government institution with turf issues gets ahold of a valuable resource.
