LinkNYC: MTA Transit Info Now Blocked

It looks like CityBridge did what everyone should have expected: They blocked access to the MTA transit update website from their LinkNYC tablets. I tried from over a dozen kiosks yesterday and today, finding access to the new MYmta website unavailable from every machine. Other network-connected functions worked as expected. MTA.info now joins social media sites, pornography and ice cream truck phone numbers as dubious denizens of LinkNYC’s selectively censored content.

I speak in jest, of course. No one expected the MTA site to get blocked, because I suspect virtually no one actually uses LinkNYC to access MTA.info in the first place. CityBridge itself probably does not know they blocked the content. If they did they might change verbiage that appears at the base of those Zen-useless bus arrival screens. You know, those screens that tell you when a bus you cannot possibly catch is approaching a bus stop ½ a mile from you? A suggestion at the bottom of those screens tells you to access the transit updates info on the tablet screen.

My set of LinkNYC By The Numbers pages showing reported outages of the kiosks’ various features had me thinking of what other potentially interesting content could be included in the raw dataset provided by CityBridge. It’s not up to me what data goes into the LinkNYC Kiosk Status dataset, and I doubt they would be receptive to suggestions from the public. But if the forces of automation could detect whether or not something like the MTA website is blocked then why not add that to the pingometer? I would also think they would want to monitor the working status of the 911 button.

In another note of interest to absolutely nobody, the ability to use LinkNYC kiosks to vote in your community’s participatory budgeting has come and gone, with no evidence to suggest that even a single person used a LinkNYC machine for voting. CityBridge, happy to boast of its WiFi usage and phone call count, never released statistics on how many people might have used LinkNYC for voting in those elections, possibly because no usage statistics exist. Similarly, as my rejected FOIL request seems to indicate, CityBridge itself does not seem to know where to find usage stats for its Aunt Bertha co-brand.

Another amusing bug now has every machine I tried prompting me to download the 311 app. I don’t think downloading and installing apps on these tablets was ever possible for regular people.