The MBTA, acknowledging that a series of website crashesexacerbated its service problems this winter, has made severaltechnological and personnel changes in an effort to make it possiblefor commuters to get better information about delays anddisruptions.
A spike in Web traffic around snowstorms overwhelmed the T'ssite, which failed three times in three weeks, shutting outthousands of people looking for service alerts, schedules, and routemaps.
"When we had our first crash I was concerned," said Richard A.Davey, general manager of the MBTA. "But when we had our second -well, our second and then our third - I was very frustrated."
The site crashes added to the stress and exasperation for peopletrying to navigate to work or home on the T - many heeding officialadvice to avoid driving during a snow emergency - at a time whenthe weather meant that rail and bus service was inconsistent.
The failures also vexed MBTA officials who have talked about theimportance of enhancing communication with customers, while alsotrying to address well-documented problems with the debt-riddentransit service itself.
Davey called the website "a core part of our business" and"critical to our mission." A reliable website could also bring morerevenue to the T; Davey has asked the marketing department toexplore selling advertising on the website as early as this summer.
"We need to make sure that we are getting customer informationright 100 percent of the time," he said. "Because if we know there'salways going to be some issue with service, we need to be in aposition to be able to convey that information. . . . My expectationis that the website will be up and running all the time - inparticular in critical situations."
In an age of real-time information and instant access, peopleexpect websites to work every time.
"We've gotten used to there being no busy signals on the Web,"said David Weinberger, a senior researcher at Harvard University'sBerkman Center for Internet & Society. "And that's especiallyimportant when the site is providing information that we need in anemergency."
Similar outages at a commercial website caused by a spike intraffic - amid, say, buzz over a Super Bowl commercial or a newsstory about a new product - would cause financial and publicheadaches. "If it were a commercial site that failed three times, itwould be able to measure its losses in very concrete terms,"Weinberger said.
In the aftermath of the site crashes, the Massachusetts BayTransportation Authority has made a series of changes - tohardware, software, and personnel - to try to prevent a recurrence.
"I have a lot of confidence that we will be back to where we werebefore January, where basically you can count on the site every daybeing there," said Gary S. Foster, chief technology officer for theMBTA, who oversees not just the website but all network and systemhardware and software, including the computing behind theCharlieCard.
Foster, who joined the T three years ago from the private sector,said until last month the site had not experienced a significantoutage during his tenure. But the T was taken by surprise by recentWeb traffic that defied predictions, he said.
For years, heavy traffic at MBTA.com meant 75,000 visitors in aday - compared with roughly 1.3 million riders. The T cracked sixfigures just once: when 100,218 went to the website during a snowyand sleeting First Night, on Dec. 31, 2008.
Nothing seemed unusual at the start of this winter. Traffic withthe first major storm set a record, with 106,236 visitors Dec. 27,but it was nothing the T couldn't handle. During the next threestorms, though, traffic nearly doubled.
Part of that, Foster said, came when the media - includingBoston.com - directed people hungry for travel information to theT's website, and thousands clicked in a matter of minutes. The T wascaught off guard.
The three-hour failure on Jan. 12 was largely caused by the T'sattempt to redesign the four-year-old "Service Alerts" box on thehomepage. But that required the database server to run more queriesthan it could handle, and most visitors got a blank page when theytried to visit MBTA.com during three peak morning hours in thestorm.
The T responded by reverting to the old box and tweaking thedatabase, but it had not finished by the next major storm, Jan. 27.The site then crashed for about an hour and a half - again duringthe morning rush - and the T estimates that as many as 40,000visitors may have been turned away, on top of the 144,000 who madeit through.
Bloggers scoffed, and one TV station described the website as"surprisingly inept." Davey told Foster he wanted an "action plan"identifying shortcomings and necessary upgrades, and he removed theMBTA.com webmaster. (The person has been "reassigned," Davey saidlast week, and is now working elsewhere at the T.)
That weekend, the remaining Web squad, supplemented by othersfrom the MBTA and Department of Transportation IT teams, worked toupgrade and test the site. They also purchased twice the database-processing power and decided that, starting with the next storm,they would have a live person at the office to monitor the websiteat all hours in a storm.
But MBTA.com fell again Feb. 1, this time in the afternoon rush.The database held up, but the site experienced a bottleneck. Twentythousand may have been turned away, but still a record 189,259 madeit through.
That day, the T made an emergency purchase of two more Webservers and began to reconfigure its load balancer. With sleetfollowing snow the next day, Feb. 2, the site held up all day -amid 170,520 visitors.
The work continues. It may not be complete this week, but itshould be finished soon, said Foster, whose goal is to develop twicethe capacity the site could ever need. The T has also taken othermeasures to get information out in a storm, including throughTwitter (@mbtagm), a stripped-down website for smartphone users, andby posting copies of its service alerts on the MassDOT site.
And as many as 80,000 smartphone users bypass the T's site on abusy day to use free or low-cost bus and subway applicationsproduced by third-party developers, using real-time data released bythe T.
In the meantime, officials are eager for spring. "Music to myears," Davey said.
Eric Moskowitz can be reached at emoskowitz@globe.com.
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