Metro should "eat its own dog food" (updated!)
Jay Tea at Wizbang blog has an interesting post:
I once read a book about the development of Windows NT (no, I really don't know why). It introduced me to a wonderful concept, inelegantly named "eating your own dog food." It was a stage of development where the programmers were forced to actually install and run Windows NT on their own computers and use that for work, to see how their efforts work for a user.
I think it's a great idea. It forces people to see just how their efforts work for the people on the other side of the fence, to see their perspective. What seems perfectly intuitive and simple to the engineer can be baffling to the end-user.
He goes on to explain that some cities employ a similar idea with residency requirements for employees, and Boston employees are none too happy about it, because of Boston's high cost-of-living.
I mentioned this one time in relation to Metro and I still think it should be a requirement -- that Metro officials and employees should be required to use Metro services. Nothing would fix Metro's pathetic offerings and service faster than Metro Bigs and employees forced to use the mass transit they have inflicted on the greater Houston area.
I will give credit to Lucas Wall (gosh, I miss that guy). He wrote about Metro and used MetroRail, and when Metro failed him, he wrote about that.
And I think it's time to see some Metro Bigs experience what Laurence Simon goes through, and then writes about. Let them deal with uninformed bus drivers and MetroLine phone answerers. Let them try to get to work on time from an outlying area, where one is required to make multiple bus changes and walk blocks to get to another stop. We've seen reports of people who have given up because it would take them 2 or 3 hours to get to work with Metro's service "improvements." Let's see these officials leave their precious cars at a Park and Pillage with no security and hope the car is intact when they return. Let officials deal with the homeless on the train.
It'll never happen, of course, but it's fun to think about.
UPDATE: Laurence details his ride home today -- three buses, one Danger Train and a brief stop at the market = a bit over TWO HOURS!
Posted by Anne Linehan @ 05/24/05 11:03 AM | Print |
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