Tuesday, March 6, 2012
News First Slice 3/6/12: MARTA's sitting on a tremendous reality TV opportunity
Posted by Thomas Wheatley @thomaswheatley on Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 8:28 AM
1. Holy crap, it's cold!
2. Capitol View Elementary and Coan and Kennedy Middle Schools are just some of the 13 schools slated for closure according to the plan Superintendent Erroll B. Davis submitted to the APS board yesterday. The first of four public hearings on the plan is March 12.
3. MARTA's board yesterday OK'ed a $17 million plan to install security cameras on the transit agency's buses and trains. Suggestion: Stream what's guaranteed to be entertaining footage on a subscription website and generate additional revenue for the cash-strapped transit agency.
4. Occupy Atlanta members converged on the Gold Dome yesterday to protest legislation aimed at cracking down on unions. In addition, occupiers and union officials say, the bill would restrict all groups' right to free assembly.
5. "Our FedEx account number? Oh, I don't know, just make something up. Those cupcakes won't send themselves."
Comments (13)
Showing 1-13 of 13
I'm sorry but I question the wisdom of dropping $17 million on cameras for the buses and trains. They already have cameras all over all of the stations so as to trains its not like somebody can walk on a train without being spotted. Plus there are to many cameras to monitor, so as MARTA has stated the cameras are meant more for crime investigation not avoidance.
But more importantly with Camera Phones isn't a camera filming the inside of a bus or train highly redundant?
This seems like a reaction to the false gang story on the late night MARTA train that got blown way out of proportion and to which certain opportunist legislators leaped on in order to win some boooga boooga spread some fear and look tough points.
What MARTA needs to do is finally get the damn Bus Tracking Satellite system up and running and trackable by phone so folks don't have to blindly stand at a bus stop and wonder why its been an 40 minutes since the last bus came.
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Please review the closure recommendations, CL.
So, Coan Middle School will be closed to Coan students who live in the neighborhood (Edgewood & Kirkwood) & they'll be moved to King & then Inman Middle's overflow will be housed at Coan.
Um, excuse me??? So kids who live in the neighborhood & can now walk to school will be bused away. And Inman kids will be bused in. BS.
Nice political wrangling.
"What MARTA needs to do is finally get the damn Bus Tracking Satellite system up and running and trackable by phone so folks don't have to blindly stand at a bus stop and wonder why its been an 40 minutes since the last bus came."
Hell yes to this. If a MARTA bus route that only runs every 45 minutes is 10 minutes overdue and nowhere in sight, I'm not wondering whether or not it's safe to ride. I'm wondering where my freakin' bus is and if I need to give up and get a ride from someone.
Unfortunately MARTA has to operate in the State of Georgia where every perceived mistake is amplified ten thousand fold so horny old dudes from the sticks can spend several months a year partying at the Pink Pony and getting favors (often of the sexual kind) from lobbyists. As long as metro Atlanta continues to be split along city/sprawl divisions, rural Georgia will have its way. MARTA just has to deal with that.
I'd love to see the bus tracker working again. They did say when it was first released back in November that is was in testing. While such a system should have been released years ago, given that testing started only about six months ago, it isn't surprising that all of the bugs haven't been worked out and the final product released yet. Of course if we had better bus frequency, tracking wouldn't be such a big deal.
AEY, where do you see that Coan would be used for overflow? Everything I've seen says it would be closed and have nobody using the property. Given the location, it'd make for a great townhouse development. You could probably get a good ten blocks of townhomes on that footprint. Buy up some of the nearby poorly maintained apartments and you could have quite a dense neighborhood. Given the current real estate market however, it's likely to end up as another decaying empty building.
Well that's embarrassing. Not only does MARTA already have that app (as you say, Zed), but I actually blogged about it. Me have good brain smarts some days, but this day no.
I blame my complete lack of an iPhone on my forgetting this.
Web version of the app: http://webwatch.itsmarta.com/MobileMap.asp…
The Ridecell version of the app seems to be offline. http://marta.ridecell.com
Ok so its still in Beta and not available for Smartphone use yet?
Do they have a guesstimate when it will be available?
I agree greater frequency would alleviate the need, though hopefully this will help some people avoid the long waits that occur when a bus route on 45 minute headways has a bus that disappears or has a bus driver running ahead of schedule.
http://www.cbsatlanta.com/story/17083882/m… according to this article they also have undercover "marshalls" riding the buses and trains - that makes sense. Actually the CBS article is a bit better in that it provides the MARTA Police Sergeant Aston Greene's comments.
Its still largely forensic and it seems to me most of the crime occurs off the vehicles - but hey if I guess I'll be ambivalent about it. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the maintenance and logistical/software(?) issues of tracking a camera on every bus in the system. Hope it doesn't add significantly to operating costs.
Maybe they can point the camera outside the front window and then provide a live feed so you can tap into the camera and figure out where your bus is.
Hey Centennian:
It can actually be found here on page 3:
http://www.atlantapublicschools.us/cms/lib…
It's sort of insult to injury, no?
lol darin, I think you were actually the one who put me onto the app, too. ;)
I think you owe me a #FF or something like that ;)
It does sound like they're placing themselves in a situation where if there is any growth in student population for that cluster that they'll quickly need a second middle school to feed into Grady.
Re: middle schools and Grady HS: I doubt the VaHi PTA junta will agree to drive their kids all the way down to f* Coan for one year, when there's been a vocal contingent to convert Howard into some sort of middle school capacity. There's a wiggle-room clause in there, which i think is designed to allow for that to happen. I just don't know which facility is in better overall shape, Coan or King, but with King at something like 1/3 capacity, don't know where Coan's at, something's gotta shake...
Sometimes I can't believe that in 2012 MARTA lags behind so much, but they have so much to deal with in the legislature and all that. Chicago has certain bus stops where the time until the next bus is displayed on an LCD panel. You don't even need to download an app or anything.
More talk about MARTA can be found here: forums.smartamarta.com.
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