When Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority customers lose their cool, they start tweeting. Passengers have begun to tweet information about cars with broken air-conditioning to the MBTA’s Twitter account (@mbtaGM) to get quick results. The tweets are forwarded to workers who can find the car and pull it out of service, if necessary. And Twitter gets the information to officials faster than calling the MBTA’s customer center, which can take a couple of hours to convey the critical information to maintenance crews, an MBTA spokesman told the Boston Herald. But the MBTA is not the only agency encouraging its readers to tweet about broken air conditioning. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (DC) had the same idea and asks riders to include the hashtag #hotcar in their tweets.
Awesome. I hope this catches on here in DC. Landing in a car who’s a/c is broken is just about the worst ending to a work day.