MetroRiderLA

Metro has officially launched the first phase of what it calls its “interactive video wall”, or Metro Interactive. Currently the site features various videos intended to “help customers and visitors more easily navigate Los Angeles”. It is also the new home of Metro Board Chair Pam O’Connor’s infamous online chats. Future plans for the site include: blogs, polls, user uploads, and live streaming video. Metro views Metro Interactive as “a tool to help us reach out to our customers”. Let’s see how phase one fares with this discerning customer.

First Impressions

Thankfully, Metro decided to go with a unique domain (or at least a subdomain) with Metro Interactive. Unlike Miss Traffic, which was hidden three directories deep in the Metro site, Metro Interactive can be reach by simply typing multimedia.metro.net into your web browser. Doing so will lead you to a site with the clean visual design that has been successfully standardized throughout Metro. Bold colors and imagery on a clean grid are complimented with the serious but friendly Scala Sans font. The header pays homage to the silhouettes of th now iconic iPod advertisements, portraying an image of a person holding a video camera. The site seems a little barren, with a sizable chunk of empty space in the top right corner, but keep in mind that this is the first-phase. Plus, less-is-more is always a good philosophy when it comes to design. One strange visual flaw is an unnecessarily low resolution Metro logo at the top of the page.

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Who will win, Metro’s Miss Traffic or Capital Metro’s i-Ride?

Cue the Rocky theme song, because today ladies and gentlemen, we here at MetroRiderLA are bringing you ringside to the transit fight of the season….

In one corner we have the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority, better known as Metro. Metro is a heavyweight in the transit world, holding the record for third largest transit agency in the country. Metro has a daily ridership of 1.6 million people, 191 bus routes covering 1,433 square miles, 5 rail lines (3 light rail and 2 subway) with 73 miles of track, and was voted “America’s Best” in 2006 by the American Public Transit Association. In addition, Metro has made numerous television and film appearances. Metro is the very definition of a contender.

In the other corner we have the Capital Metropolitan Transit Authority, also known as Capital Metro. This bantamweight from Austin, TX is scrappy in every sense of the word. With only 68 bus routes, no rail (a commuter line is scheduled to open this year), and a ridership of 130,000, Capital Metro is a David to Metro’s Goliath. Sure Capital Metro offers dirt cheap fares (50 cents is the most you’ll pay), interactive Google based bus maps, HTML formated schedules, and Wi-Fi access for passengers, but does that stuff even matter?

What’s brought these two clearly unbalanced fighters here today is the marketing contests both agencies are currently promoting. Metro will henceforth be represented by Miss Traffic and Capital Metro will be reprsented by i-Ride. Miss Traffic and i-Ride are both contests that attempt to get people excited about transit by telling stories about why they ride. This fight is over which contest is better.

Let’s get ready to rumble!!!

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