I love the MTA and I love nerdy web things and I love maps, so of course I’m intrigued by this new real-time version. It’s … ok. Pretty slow and the trains themselves are hard to find on the actual map. It also seems this is veering a little too hard on the wrong side of CivTech — I tend to prefer robust and well supported APIs from government that anyone can build on top of.

And now, a digression.

The Times article quotes Sarah Meyer, and lists her job title as “chief customer officer at New York City Transit”. It’s always bugged me, both as a resident and even when I just came to town to visit, that the MTA refers to riders as “customers”. It’s a tiny thing, but that one word says so much about how we treat essential municipal services in even progressive places like NYC.

The MTA is not a business and I am not a customer. I’m a citizen. I’m a rider. I’m a person. By deciding to adopt this language of commerce for the services they provide, the MTA (and it’s not just the MTA) is playing into the kind of anti-government rhetoric that ultimately makes it harder for them to do their jobs. And it would be pretty easy for them to simply not do that.