[HN Gopher] A Gripe about the Los Angeles Metro Bike App
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A Gripe about the Los Angeles Metro Bike App
Author : polalavik
Score : 38 points
Date : 2022-04-14 19:05 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (veryla.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (veryla.io)
| renewiltord wrote:
| It would be nice if these were built with public APIs so that
| alternative chromes could be built around those. But the same
| factors that make the apps shitty make the APIs shitty, I
| suppose.
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| > 2. Why do I need to purchase a pass at all?
|
| > In an ideal world, where things work like standard tech that
| already exists, I would attach a credit card, walk up to a bike,
| and get automatically charged for unlocking it/riding it. I'm
| trying to give you my money, Los Angeles!
|
| For the same reason any other business offers a discount for
| buying in advance / in bulk: "Revenue today" is more valuable to
| a seller than "a little revenue today, and maybe a little more at
| a later date".
| nullrecursion wrote:
| It's buggy and doesn't work well because people who have no idea
| how software works are in charge of managing software projects.
| There's a good book titled "Power to the public" that goes into
| this phenomenon in-depth and explains why most government
| software projects end up being dumpster fires.
| Melatonic wrote:
| It is definitely a bit of a pain to use and I have had issues
| with the bikes not being maintained. That being said its
| relatively easy to just switch to another one.
|
| Much bigger problem in my opinion is that while the Metro lines
| are rapidly expanding they have very poor bicycle support. There
| is almost no space for bicycles and even on the cars that do have
| space it very quickly gets taken up by other people.
| asdff wrote:
| There are some bike rooms but not nearly enough imo. Every
| station should have a perfectly safe place to stow a bike where
| it can't be robbed.
| blululu wrote:
| This app is super buggy. The UX has so many glitches (engineering
| failures).
|
| Probably the biggest UX snafu that I found is that one can unlock
| a bike across town by mistake and then get billed $2000 for it
| getting lost/stolen. Take what Lyft did and copy that.
|
| This is an app that is used by a lot of tourists - many of whom
| have minimal English skills. The UX failures are embarrassing.
| Whoever did this should be held responsible for breaking their
| SLA.
| clairity wrote:
| as crappy as the app is, using a tap card on subscription
| usually works like a charm (although bike return doesn't always
| register perfectly, creating overbilling issues that customer
| service does resolve for you).
| polalavik wrote:
| It feels like the whole thing was built by an intern over the
| course of one summer. Realistically, the city is probably
| paying an uncompetitive wage in a very competitive market and
| thus hiring less-than-competent engineers to service millions
| and millions of people.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Or they contracted it out to an agency which then assigned
| someone to do whatever they could in 2 weeks.
|
| React Native says web developers are automatically highly
| qualified app developers.
| calsy wrote:
| What makes app developers so special? The only extra
| requirement is that you don't break the rules of
| Apple/Google's sandbox play area, else you can release
| whatever garbage you want.
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