LA Metro, aka “the Department of Huh?!?”

April 14, 2010

For the longest time, our transportation department here in LA has been promising to add a “cash purse” feature to it’s prepaid transit pass (aka TAP) card. (How hard can this be? You’ve got the vending machines; this should be a simple reprogramming. Maybe take one of those engineers you have assigned to traffic light control?)

EDIT: “Cash Purse” means that you can add single fares (or blocks of them, as with NYC’s Metrocard.)
Right now, TAP can only be loaded with daily, weekly, or monthly passes.

Anyway, a couple of nights ago, I tweeted a question to Metro, asking when the feature would be added. The good news is that my question was addressed (along with others) on the agency’s official blog. The bad news? The answer was “we don’t answer questions sent to us via social media.”

Thanks for the big FU, Metro. And a very special and warm hug for showing us that your electronic outreach efforts are all for show.

Read the lamest blog entry since the Book of Mormon here: http://j.mp/a6MrP7

Comments are closed.

Using the blog…

THE BANANA BLOG is about the world's most endangered - and dangerous - fruit. THE BIG PARADE is about stairways, route and transit geekery, and pedestrian pursuits in Los Angeles. You can also read all the topics at once, which might also include productivity, geekery, DIY whatever, mountain biking, stuff that I think is funny that nobody else likely will, and other boring, useless crap.

Read and Buy Some Books

Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman recommends it. Listen to my interview on NPR's Fresh Air. My own op-ed in the New York Times.

Other Books:

Visit my bookstore

Connections:

FACEBOOK: dan koeppel / big parade / TWITTER: bigparadela / dan koeppel / RSS: big parade / bananas / asymptotes / everything / CONTACT: email.