Great SMS idea for public transportation
August 4, 2011||
Here’s a great SMS (text message to the rest of us) idea that uses your phone to buy one-off tickets.
This would be a huge timesaver for people in heavy public transportation areas, like New York City, reducing time, expense, and just about everything for commuters and the various transit authorities and private companies.
FINALLY! New Jersey Transit has a smartphone app (http://www.njtransit.com/var/var_servlet.srv?hdnPageAction=MobileTicketingTo) that you can use to buy [certain] train tickets. It then displays a QR code to get through the scanners at Secaucus (if you have to switch to the commuter trains to Penn).
Usability wasn’t that bad, actually. I hope they will iterate a bit. There’s some weird quirky “activation” requirement that has you “activating” a ticket which makes it start to self-destruct in 2h 45min. I guess they couldn’t figure out how to tell a conductor that you’d already used it otherwise. I’m not saying it’s broken, just odd and not explained in the normal user flow of the application.
I’d make fun of the name, but that would just sound mean. I do recall reading, back during the dotcom boom, about startups not knowing anything about marketing and that if the typical startup had their way, “Chevron” would be called “My Gas.” ‘Nuff said? (And that quote might be off; Google doesn’t spit out anything from 99-02 in that vein. I will post the source if someone knows it.)