2 QR R 0 2 QR


The current issue of the Queens Chronicle newspaper has a letter to the editor by yours truly about the latest of the MTA's bad decisions endured by NYC transit riders.  I kept it as concise as possible for print, but on my own blog I can try to expand a bit on why the removal of QR codes was so particularly annoying:

  • It takes a bit of technical know-how to explain what exactly QR codes actually are — they're sort of like an Internet-connected update of bar codes for the wireless age — but their removal eliminated the benefit they had for riders who knew how to use them, without any countervailing gain for those who don't.
  • The QR codes linked to significantly more useful and accurate schedule information than could be conveyed in the static schedules that were phased out for supposedly being too costly to maintain, and can keep access to up-to-date info without needing the physical printout to be replaced: each code is tied to a webpage link which not only can theoretically updated periodically, but is in real time.
  • Actually using a QR code requires a working, charged smartphone that may be fiscally out of reach for some passengers -- but so do the newer printed guidelines on the bus stops, which only provide directions on how to call up bus schedule information rather than the info itself.
  • The webpages the QR codes used to provide links to are still up and running on the MTA Bus Time website, so it's still possible for savvy users to personally access the links via bookmarks or search -- but it takes more time do so so (and more than enough time that a bus can be missed while looking to see if the bus is going to arrive!), and runs the risk of pulling up the info for the wrong bus stop (often, bus stops in opposite directions on the same line have identical names), whereas the codes would always be for their own specific stop.
It's just a baffling case of fixing what ain't broke, reminiscent of the early Internet copypasta about how "Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet" ... except that features are only being removed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Announcing the Carl Sagan memorial blog-a-thon

Next month, December 20, 2006 will mark the tenth anniversary Carl Sagan's passing. In his honor, I am organizing a special memorial "blog-a-thon" among Sagan's fans throughout the blogosphere. If you're a Sagan fan with a blog, you can participate by posting something related to him on or near that date. Read or reread a Sagan book and review it; discuss cool things that you've done that's been influenced by him; pontificate on one of the many topics he treated (SETI, astronomy, critical thinking, the history of science, human intelligence....), or post about something completely surprising. Contact me by email or by leaving a comment, and then when the date approaches, I will create a meta-post that links to all the stuff people are doing, providing a network of the participating bloggers. A list of Sagan stuff online that may be a source of ideas. Carl's son Nick Sagan on the blog-a-thon . Publicity for the blog-a-thon includes Cornell Univer
Read more

AOL Hometown shutting down, and taking a bit of bronze with it

Well, with the announcement that AOL's Hometown service is shutting down by October 31, one of the truly old school web hosting sites from the early days of the Web, up there with GeoCities and Tripod, and all of the websites hosted at URLs "hometown.aol.com", "members.aol.com" and "users.aol.com", will be going the way of Xoom into the land of dead bits. The shutdown is pretty abrupt; the formal announcement was only posted on September 30, and according to it, if webmasters don't back up their website files by the 31st, they'll simply be gone. All Hometown pages have one of two prominently placed banners atop the pages announcing the shutdown, one of which says "AOL Hometown is Closing its Doors. Find out how to BACK UP AND SAVE YOUR FILES before we say goodbye for good." and the other stating that "A Blogger is Always Prepared. DON'T GET LEFT BEHIND. Learn how to BACK UP & SAVE YOUR INFORMATION now." (desp
Read more

Early animated feature "The Adventures of Prince Achmed" screening in NYC

On November 11 and November 15, the Museum of Modern Art will screen , with live piano accompaniment, one of the earliest animated features ever made (and made by one of the earliest female animators), Lotte Reiniger's 1926 Arabian Nights fantasy The Adventures of Prince Achmed . Reiniger made films by painstakingly animating intricate silhouette cutouts, and the results are gorgeous to behold. The screening is part of a series on film preservation, and so I assume it's a restored version; I haven't been able to find out exactly how (or if) this differs from the version that has been available on DVD for a while, but the runtime given is 8 minutes longer than the DVD's.
Read more