Those of you reading from Vancouver know that on Sunday, we got a huge dump of snow – the biggest, daresay, we’ve had this winter season. Monday morning, I already knew just from the amount of snow on the ground that the world past Hastings Street would be a complete mess. I didn’t even bother checking the news, so Richard passed on the news: a CN rail train had derailed in Coquitlam, so the West Coast Express was not going past Coquitlam. TransLink would be running buses from Coquitlam to the SkyTrain to go to downtown, and Translink was advising people to dress more warmly than usual in anticipation of waits for buses and trains. For people moving around Burnaby and Vancouver, I could not even imagine what madness lay on the major arteries like Highway 1, Hastings, Lougheed Highway or Broadway.
You notice what’s been missing in all of this? iMove. I didn’t even check the iMove website until right now, sitting in Tara Hunt’s session on Government 2.0, remembering Transit Camp.
What’s there?
- Absolutely nothing about the West Coast Express being unoperational past Coquitlam. In fact, the default view for Current Advisories doesn’t even bring up “Current Incidents,” so I had to look specifically for accident or service disruption information on the Transit tab.
- Once you even bring up the Current Incidents, the first event on the list is…an event closure in Richmond on February 8th? Everything listed is “minor” and related to construction. There’s absolutely nothing about the transit re-routing. In fact, the dates on most of these advisories are from November 2007.
This is really all the proof I need that iMove has been utterly and majorly abandoned. It’s got almost no relevant or timely data on it. It loads like a wooly mammoth chasing me from the stone age. The first time that people might actually be able to see this application perform a service, it has obviously abandoned even the semblance of an attempt to be useful. That’s pretty unfortunate, and I hope TransLink and all those other involved parties on the left sidebar (Drive BC, Ministry of Transportation – they’re so embarrassed that their icons on iMove don’t even have links to their websites) are doing a lot of deep, hard thinking about this massive failure in their attempt to develop a service.
One Comment
Great post Karen! TL has no excuse for not even attempting to salvage the product. Unless they have a huge redo up their sleeves (which they should at least inform us of then, to avoid all this bad press), well, then, it’s just despicable that they could spend $1 million public dollars of such a waste.