Mobasoft
Home of the Social Cowboy
Subscribe to RSS FeedMichael Bailey became interested in Social Media in the Summer of 2005 and has devoted thousands of hours towards the development of the MobaTalk Conversation Studio. He believes that the Context of Conversational data is quickly lost on the web using the currently available tools.
SCOUT should use Twitter
I'm the Idea Guy
Perhaps the title of this post should have been "Local IT guy spearheads implementation" but, unless the fine folks at KDOT and MoDOT actually decide to implement my suggestion….well, there's only so much that one person can do.
As an avid Twitter user, I thought about an idea for our regional traffic monitoring system (called SCOUT). They should use the Twitter service as an additional method of alerting citizens to their collection of alerts such as freeway traffic, weather, amber alerts, ozone, and public safety.
What is Kansas City Scout?
Kansas City Scout is Kansas City's bi-state traffic management system. The Kansas and Missouri departments of transportation (KDOT, MoDOT) designed Scout to lessen traffic jams by improving rush-hour speeds, to increase safety by decreasing the number of rush-hour accidents, and to improve emergency response to traffic situations.
Scout manages traffic on more than 90 miles of continuous freeways in the greater Kansas City metropolitan area. Scout uses cameras to monitor the highways from its operations center in Lee's Summit, relies on sensors to gage traffic flow, uses large electronic message boards to send urgent traffic notices to drivers along the freeways, and activates a Highway Advisory Radio system that motorists in Missouri can tune to in the event of a freeway incident.
Great idea! You could even have those updates sent to the cell phone for on-the-fly traffic alerts. Of course, that would mean people are checking their SMS messages while driving…
Ed,
True, but they already do that anyhow ;^)
I originally went to the KC Scout website after seeing an AD on TV regarding ‘text message’ alerts for traffic. To which I thought, “cool”.
Then, when I got to the website, they don’t have any way to sign-up for these alerts (”My KC Scout”). Instead, when you get to the page that describes it, it’s a link to .PDF??? WTF. You can’t even sign-up for it.
I wonder how much they spent on the AD campaign, they are obviously losing valuable visitors and sign-ups.
http://www.kcscout.net/MyKCScout.aspx
–
Ramsey