The MTA is considering bringing back its live Twitter alerts for transit service after Elon Musk backed off a demand for payment to automate posts.
The software engineer, who lived in New York but recently moved back to his native Texas, mainly tweets from the accountDavis told amNewYork Metro that he dug into the code and learned all the data used for the alerts was open source and posted to the, a web “standard” where transit agencies upload real-time data on their systems. Besides Twitter alerts, GTFS is also used to provide service information within Google Maps.
After learning that, it didn’t take long for Davis, who was a regular subway commuter when he lived in New York, to figure out how to make his own live alerts bot. “Not super hard,” Davis said. “It just took like an hour.” “It’s not insignificant,” he said. “But it’s something that I can foot and it definitely provides more than $100 of value to New Yorkers.”
Even if it can provide a service during the MTA’s twitter outage, Davis cautions that his bot is just a “lightweight version” of the MTA’s account and not a replacement. For one, he does not monitor it 24/7 and does not manually answer riders’ questions like the MTA, instead just letting the bot post automatically. He also has only made a version for subway alerts, not for bus and commuter rail.
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