Things happen on the roads and the rails — crashes, construction, demonstrations — that can force buses and trains to deviate from their routes and run late or not at all.
Starting Monday, Metro Transit is launching a new Twitter account dedicated to alerting riders when trips are canceled, delayed or rerouted.
The account @MT_MN_Alerts will broadcast real-time alerts the agency already posts on its website and sends by e-mail and text message to riders who subscribe to receive them.
"This is part of a larger effort to improve communication around service disruptions," Transit Information Project Manager Bre Grand said. "It provides an additional way to find out about service disruptions."
The new Twitter account is for outgoing messages only, meaning Metro Transit staff won't monitor it for comments. Riders can continue to engage staff on the agency's main Twitter feed, @MetroTransitMN.
To make the alerts easy to follow, each tweet will be accompanied by an icon. Bus Rider Alerts will feature a red bus, while a blue or green light-rail train icon will denote alerts about Blue or Green Line LRT service. The number of Rider Alerts issued for current or upcoming schedule changes can vary from day to day, but an event such as a winter snowstorm could trigger a barrage of tweets.
"That's one of the reasons we created graphics to provide a visual cue for which modes our alerts are for," Grand said.
Metro Transit installed new technology over the summer that allows staff members to push alerts across multiple platforms simultaneously, including the new Twitter account. The system, called TRANSIT-alerts, also produces an industry standard data feed that allows third parties such as Google or the Transit app to display the same alerts.
