Monthly Archives: August 2008

| Montreal, Opinion, Public transit

11 problems with STM’s new magnetic fare card

Nameless new STM fare/transfer card

Nameless new STM fare/transfer card

This spring, after outfitting all buses and metro stations with new equipment, the STM introduced a new, smarter fare system which uses smart cards instead of magnetic-strip passes, and cards with magnetic strips instead of … tickets with magnetic strips. Both not only serve as fare payment, but also as transfers.

Though Opus, the smart card, is the sexier and more revolutionary of the new fare cards, the STM started with this flimsy paper thing that has caused nothing but confusion and problems (even its website is down)

Below is a list of the problems I’ve noticed with the non-Opus paper card, even though I’ve never actually used one:

  1. It doesn’t have a name. Unlike the Opus smart card, which has a whole branding effort behind it, this paper magnetic card has neither a proper branding name nor any simple two-word description. The result is that people can’t describe it in a way that obviously differentiates it from the Opus card.
  2. The card was announced in the same breath as the Opus card, further leading to confusion.
  3. The card is neither reusable nor recyclable. The result is that they fill trashcans and litter streets.
  4. The card also acts as a proof-of-payment system, which means it must be carried until the end of the trip. This is a departure from the current fare payment system which has not adequately been explained. Since proof of payment isn’t enforced in the system (because some people still use old tickets and old metro transfers), it leads to even more confusion.
  5. The card replaces both single fares and strips of six tickets. This has led to a problem where users insert the card into a turnstile and then don’t retrieve it, losing the other five tickets. That has resulted in a change of policy, and they now issue six cards with one fare each, instead of one card with six fares. This leads to more waste.
  6. Metro turnstiles don’t open until the user retrieves the card. Many users have no reason to retrieve the cards because they’ve already paid their fare.
  7. While the Opus card arguably makes fare payment faster, this card makes it take longer. The machines on buses take five seconds to process a card or eject a new one, from the time payment is accepted and the green light appears. Five seconds may not seem like much, but multiply that by a dozen people getting on, and the bus is already a minute late. A bus that gets a lot of tourists or occasional riders is going to experience significant delays.
  8. Bus fare boxes issue cards for every fare paid. But because they’re treated as optional transfers, users who aren’t planning to transfer move to the back of the bus before the card is issued. Drivers have to manually collect the cards, which they then give out when other users pay using tickets. When the number of people paying cash and not wanting a transfer outweighs the number paying tickets and wanting one, a surplus emerges which the driver has to dispose of.
  9. When inserted into a fare box, no feedback is given other than a green light (fare accepted) or red light (fare rejected). Because the cards act as both fare payment and transfer, there’s no way to tell until after the fact whether the fare box has accepted a transfer or deducted another fare. (This is a larger problem with the Opus card, which has no human-readable indication of how many fares remain on it.)
  10. Because the card is designed for disposability, it isn’t very tough. As a result it gets folded and wrinkled and then becomes unreadable, causing further delays.
  11. The cards are not accepted on minibuses or collective taxis.

Have you noticed any problems with the card apart from these? Comment below and I’ll add them to the list.

| Fun, Montreal

Bubble Battle on Saturday

From the people that brought you Manhunt, metro parties, pillow fights and other pointless fun comes a bubble battle, scheduled for Saturday at 4pm at Phillips Square:

This Saturday, come blow bubbles with us at Phillips Square. Watch people’s eyes light up as millions of bubbles soar majestically through the air. Bring friends, cameras and, of course, what you need to create bubbles

You can join the Facebook event or, you know, just show up with bubble-making equipment of your choice.

| Media, Opinion, Slow News Day

Nobody reads fine print (except ours, right?)

The Gazette has a Canwest-penned article in today’s paper (complete with adorable photo of Montreal-guy-who-visits-websites) about how people don’t read the fine print when visiting websites and entering into contracts with web companies. It cites their obscene length as a key factor:

In the case of online ticket purchases, if you actually click to read Ticketmaster’s fine print before buying concert tickets, the terms run nearly 6,200 words. It takes far longer to read than the three minutes and 15 seconds Ticketmaster gives you to make a decision to buy tickets.

It also points out that the terms can be abusive to the point of absurdity:

They’re often lengthy and complicated. Sometimes they can be changed unilaterally by the company, and they usually include a limited corporate liability clause.

Readers are encouraged to comment on this article. In order to do that, you have to agree to this 785-word license release, which also requires you to read and agree to this 10,509-word general website terms of service. Both contain an absolute liability waiver, and the latter contains a clause that allows the company to unilaterally change the terms without notice. It also contains gems like these:

  1. Except as provided herein, you agree not to reproduce, make derivative works of, retransmit, distribute, sell, publish, communicate, broadcast or otherwise make available any of the Content obtained through a canada.com Site or any of the Services, including without limitation, by caching, framing, deep-linking or similar means, without the prior written consent of the respective copyright owner of such Content.
  2. You shall not have any right to terminate the permissions granted herein, nor to seek, obtain, or enforce any injunctive or other equitable relief against canada.com, all of which such rights are hereby expressly and irrevocably waived by you in favour of canada.com.
  3. You acknowledge having obtained independent legal advice in connection with this license, release and waiver, failing which, you shall be deemed to have voluntarily waived the right to seek such independent legal advice.

Don’t let it be said my bosses don’t have a sense of humour.

(By submitting a comment to this blog post, you hereby agree that Fagstein is awesome.)

| Media, Navel-gazing

Great Scot

I make fun of media mistakes, so I guess it’s fair play that I point out one of my own.

Last week, while putting together sports pages for Sunday, I selected a nice photo of Rafael Nadal throwing a wristband into the crowd at the Rogers Cup in Toronto as the cover art. He had just reached the men’s singles final (a match he would, of course, win) by defeating another player.

In the caption below the photo, there was a reference to that player being from the U.K., so I changed “U.K.” to “England” to fit the paper’s style guide.

Unfortunately, that player was Andy Murray, who I would learn from a few sources (including a particularly offended coworker) is Scottish, not English.

It’s bad enough when you learn you’ve made a mistake. Worse when it results in a correction, and horrifying when it results in an editor’s note. But when you have to read a letter to the editor correcting one of your mistakes, that hurts.

I will, of course, be posting a letter of formal apology to Scotland’s president at 10 Downing Street in Belfast post-haste.

UPDATE (Aug. 4): My attempt at penance as a headline-writer.

| Montreal, Pop quiz

Name at least three things wrong with this picture

Corner of St. Grégoire and Christophe Colomb near Laurier Park

Corner of St. Grégoire and Christophe Colomb near Laurier Park

(At least, from a cyclist’s point of view)

UPDATE: Plenty of people got right answers below.

  1. The most obvious problem is that the bicycle chevrons painted on the road are backwards. Most people ignore them, but it wouldn’t be hard to imagine an unthinking cyclist veering into the oncoming lane.
  2. The traffic signs clearly indicate a mandatory left or right turn. Because there is no specific bicycle signage, cyclists are by law required to obey traffic signs and not pedestrian signs, which would make the obvious course technically illegal. Cyclists should not use pedestrian signals unless specifically told to do so.
  3. A cyclist on the other side is blocking the oncoming lane, perhaps confused by the chevrons.
| Montreal, Photos

Fireworks quality scale

Impressed looks from small children: Good.

Surprises you didn’t expect: Better.

Perfect synchronization with cool music: Great.

Cheers and applause from the crowd: Awesome.

Having to take a shower when you get home because you’re covered in soot: Total pwnage.

| Blogosphere, Media, Navel-gazing, Opinion

Nobody wants to read 1,000 comments

Patrick Lagacé brought up a point about comments on blogs, and how he’s not entirely sure what good they do him. Being a popular blog, it gets a lot of trolls and other pointless and unhelpful commentary. Comments easily reach into the dozens, sometimes hundreds.

That was also the subject of an interview Pat did on CIBL with Michel Dumais (Mario Asselin has the details) in which Pat totally name-drops me (near the end of the audio clip):

Dumais: … Vous êtes très fréquenté, vous générez beaucoup de commentaires. Mais ça serait pas intéressant pour vous peut-être de commencer à fréquenter aussi des autres blogues et à laisser des commentaires? …

Lagacé: Oui, j’essai de faire un peu. En fait le seul blogue ou je le fait, j’estime que c’est le meilleur blogue de couverture médiatique à Montréal, c’est le blogue de Steve Faguaiylle … Faguy… son blogue c’est Fagstein — qui couvre les médias montréalais, surtout anglo, mais un peu québecois… francophone aussi. C’est le seul ou je vais. Les autres, je sais pas. Un peu de manque de temps, un peu de manque d’intérêt.

(If my blog were a movie, that quote would go at the top of the poster.)

Although the number of comments on Pat’s blog causes a bit of professional jealousy on my part (second only to hair jealousy), it’s very rare that I’ll read the comments attached to one of his posts. Not so much because of the trolling (though it is apparent), but because there’s just so darn many of them. I don’t have time to read all the posts on blogs I’m subscribed to as it is. I certainly don’t have time to read 50 comments attached to each post, especially when they don’t have anything interesting to add.

And then there’s situations when the number of comments simply gets out of hand. The decapitation-on-a-bus story I talked about earlier now has 1,700 comments, most of which are repetitive. Has anyone read them all?

One easy solution is to stop approving troll comments. We set minimum limits (usually legal ones) for the types of comments we approve in moderation, but why set the barrier so low? Why not set them to the same level as we do letters to the editor? Just because there is space for more doesn’t mean we should bury any truly interesting comments in a pile of useless junk.

But even then, the number of comments can still be unbearable in very popular blogs or news stories or anywhere else one might have an attached discussion forum. When that happens, it’s time to start removing comments that aren’t really interesting (comments that simply agree, disagree, approve, disapprove, or otherwise give a comment without explaining it or adding anything new, as well as those that repeat things already said by others).

The standard response to that is: That’s censorship. It’s not though, it’s moderation. Nobody’s stopping you from posting your useless comments about my blog post on your blog or on some other forum somewhere. When I disapprove a comment it’s because I find it of no use to my readership.

But some still think that’s too far. So is there another method to get these runaway comments under control?

Well, Slashdot answered that question years ago with its comment system. The website, whose format looks very similar to blogs even though it predates them, has a threaded comment system, so comments can be traced back to their parents and sorted according to thread. This level of organization (and the ability to turn it on or off as needed) helps a big deal when dealing with a large number of comments.

More importantly, though, Slashdot has a peer moderation system that allows users to rate each others’ comments. Positive reviews increase a comment’s rating, and negative reviews decrease it. The result is that each comment is assigned a numerical rating (from -1 to +5), and readers can filter comments based on that rating. Set it to zero to get rid of just the trolls. Set it to +5 to get only the dozen or so truly exceptional or interesting or useful comments you need.

I’m surprised that every large-scale blogging system ever made hasn’t copied this system in some way. Instead, you see unthreaded comments with no rating system. The only judgment made is whether they meet the minimum requirements for posting, and that’s not good enough when our attention is so limited.

My blog, though it gets quite a few comments, doesn’t get near enough to start implementing stricter screening or peer moderation, but if I had 500 comments a day, I would certainly seriously consider it.

| Media, Sports

Gazette starting Olympics page, photographer blog

As editor-in-chief Andrew Phillips explains in a blog post, The Gazette is jumping on the bandwagon and has launched an Olympics website to cover the Beijing Games that start next week, at www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/sports/beijing2008/index.html. Most of the web content is provided by Canwest, which has a similar page (as does the Ottawa Citizen, Vancouver Sun, etc.)

Other media outlets have already launched Olympics pages, which I have almost universally panned. That said, it’s clear the news media is making a much bigger effort toward these games in terms of online coverage. (It remains to be seen which of these websites will have better live coverage of the Games.)

As part of local coverage of the Games (and to justify the oodles of money spent sending him there), The Gazette is also starting a blog for photographer John Mahoney, who will accompany reporter Dave Stubbs to Beijing (Stubbs already has a blog up with funny little stories leading up to the Games). Mahoney has a first post relating Beijing to his first Olympics in Lake Placid in 1980.

The paper, of course, will also have special coverage. Mahoney has photo profiles of different athletes each day starting Saturday, there will be a special Olympics preview section on Wednesday, and each day of the Games will have special Olympics sections with pages of coverage (some of which will be edited by yours truly).

| Montreal, Radio

CJLO begins early testing on 1690 AM

Radio watchers around town are noticing some strange noises high up on the AM dial. CJLO, Concordia University’s student radio station, has finally got equipment setup to begin broadcasting on its assigned frequency, 1690kHz, and is beginning tests.

The CJLO saga goes way back to about 2001, when a real campaign to get it on the airwaves began. A Concordia Student Union vice-president remarked at the time that he expected it to be on the air by the end of the school year or 2003 at the latest. The station submitted its application to the CRTC in 2004 for use of the 1690kHz frequency, and the application was approved in March 2006, giving it 24 months to begin broadcasting (they were granted an extension to Oct. 1, 2008).

The antenna is erected and connected in a mud pit in Lachine, just down the hill from the station’s Loyola home. The station is currently limited to short, 5-minute tests (mostly generated tones to test reception and range) until an inspector arrives to do his thing. Once that’s done at the end of August, the station can begin full testing and launch in the fall.

More from the CJLO AM blog.

Now, does anyone have an AM radio lying around? More importantly, one recent enough to have the extended AM band that CJLO is in?

| Opinion, Slow News Day, TV, Video

Flying babies are awesome

Patrick Lagacé points to this report about a kid in Georgia who bounced a baby across a room by jumping on an inflatable pillow. He’s now facing charges for child cruelty.

Of course, because there’s video of the incident, TV news was all over this story. Sure, the video is disturbing, but people will watch it. So they play it over and over. That’s an average of one baby launch every 7.5 seconds.

Did they think we’d forget after the first 15 times what it looked like?