This really belongs in Why My Hair Dont Grow No More. Want to see why kids alone aren’t responsible for my hair loss? Well, read on. Some days Murphy strikes hard and everything that can go wrong, goes wrong (and then some).
I am about to leave for the Transit Open House today when I notice that my mother-in-law has parked her car behind mine, blocking my car in the garage. I try to call my wife but she doesn’t answer. Sadly, there’s no all-day transit on Scott Blvd so for a few minutes I think I can’t go.
“No wait”, I tell myself, “I can walk to the hospital and take route-2”. The hospital is 1.4kms from my house, not the end of the world.
So I run to the basement and accidentally pick up the new map, one effective September 7th. I noticed that the bus was due soon, so I run to the hospital quickly. Fortunately, I get there just as the bus pulls in and I catch the bus. This is where the drama starts.
The bus goes somewhere else, not where I expected (of course, I looked in the new map). So now I am stuck in the bus, $3 short (I did not have exact change), going further away from where I needed to be. Well, the bus goes all around (old route is horrible) and takes me to the GO station. I ask the driver and he tells me to take route-2 going the other way.
Foolish me, I expected route-2 to go west on Main, which would take me to my destination. Oh no, that would be too easy. The bus starts to go back towards the hospital using same route it took to get to the GO station. I patiently waited for 10 minutes and finally at Laurier and Ontario, I panic and get off. The bus had retraced it steps and logic dictated that it would continue to do so, ending up at the hospital.
Logic would be wrong.
Oh what do I see when I get off? Instead of continuing on, the bus turns north on Ontario towards the Main St. “Argh”, I go to pull my hair and realized I had already lost it.
Now I am 40 minutes late, $3 short and steps away from where I got on the bus. I hopelessly see the bus racing towards my destination as I contemplate what else could go wrong.
So I start another 1.5 km walk and finally arrive an hour late. Did I mention I couldn’t run because I did not want to sweat? I had to walk fast enough to get there quickly but not so fast that I would sweat.
So there. My story of how I walked to the Senior Centre from home and still spent 30 minutes in the bus, getting a tour of Milton I really did not have time for.
At least I made it to the open house in time to be yelled out (not literally) by four very nice ladies in their 80s about how the town doesn’t listen to them and doesn’t give them a proper transit system.
All of the aggravation could’ve been avoided if you had access to Milton transit data on your mobile phone. This challenge is being solved worldwide with the #opendata movement, in which Open Transit — publishing raw transit schedule / stop data — is one of the simlest scenarios that can benefit citizens, immediately.
Rather than investing $$ into printing a ton of paper schedules that easily get lost and are overall rather challenging to read, we should post the data online and have it available in any of the popular formats that developers could use to build web, mobile and other types of applications.
How can this be accomplished? Who has done this, and been successful? How can we help? — I’m one of the memebers of a growing community of IT professionals: SiliconHalton, and I’m behind a local group “OpenHalton” to help the region and the city make best use of the data they have, and we as taxpayers already paid for.
You, Jennifer, Rick & others should consider Open Data as a platform for your candidacy, and a change that has huge impact for many Miltonians.
@Nik,
Let me look into #opendata.
I’ve been pushing for raw data, including GPS coordinates of buses, to be published so Miltonians can write cool apps.
Zeeshan.
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