It is the end of a transit era. After years of providing Upper East Side residents with around-the-clock updates on Twitter, the perpetually fiscally-challenged Metropolitan Transportation Authority has ended real-time alerts on the social media platform, citing the sky-high cost demanded by billionaire James Bond villain-wannabe Elon Musk and the service’s instability under his watch.
The Boring Company, SpaceX, Tesla and Neuralink owner wants the cash-strapped agency (along with all other enterprise users) to cough up at least $42,000 a month — a whopping $504,000 each year — to keep the real-time service alerts flowing from the MTA computers to automated posts on the Twitter accounts, including @NYCTSubway, which has one million followers.
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“The MTA does not pay tech platforms to publish service information and has built redundant tools that provide service alerts in real-time,” Shanifah Rieara, MTA Acting Chief Customer Officer, said in a statement in response to an inquiry from Upper East Site, explaining that the agency “has terminated posting service information to Twitter, effective immediately, as the reliability of the platform can no longer be guaranteed.”
The transit agency announced the change through its primary Twitter account after 6:00 pm Thursday, following a second interruption in two weeks to the MTA’s access to the social network’s API, or application programming interface — which is a fancy way of saying how the computers communicate — early Thursday morning.
Twitter responded to an inquiry from Upper East Site with a poop emoji.
Don’t worry; there are still plenty of ways to know whether your commute is totally screwed because of a sick passenger on a 6 train at 68th Street-Hunter College or a signal problem at 86th Street-Lexington Avenue.
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“Those include the MYmta and TrainTime apps, the MTA’s homepage at MTA.info, email alerts and text messages,” added Rieara, “Service alerts are also available on thousands of screens in stations, on trains and in buses.”
Even though they won’t be tweeting real-time subway service alerts, the MTA’s Twitter accounts will continue to be monitored by agency staffers, who can still respond when customers alert them to men smoking and masturbating on your uptown 6 train.
