Bus company failing miserably at tech impersonation

COTA is screwing over drivers (again) after getting caught flat-footed by a ransomware attack.

I live 1.2 miles from the gym along Parsons Avenue. In a functioning city, I wouldn’t need to check a schedule; a bus would arrive every seven minutes.

In Columbus, it’s faster for me to walk to the gym unless the bus hits its stop within two minutes of my arrival. Sometimes I’ll rush to to meet the time given to me by the TransitApp, only to be told that my bus is actually 13 minutes away when I arrive at the stop.

The few remaining people that use COTA to get downtown for their workday can’t rely on something like that. Those workers, like most people other than COTA leadership, have bosses to which they’re accountable. Bosses tend to expect reliability from their employees, including showing up on time.

If a transit service can’t reliably deliver its customers to a destination on time, it essentially does not exist for those people. It then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when ridership falls off a cliff.

Since roughly Tuesday night, the live arrival times on Transit App, which were unreliable to begin with, were unavailable. As is the ability to SMS text COTA for arrival times.

I chalked it up to standard COTA jankiness. That was a mistake. COTA is currently reeling from a ransomware attack that crippled its IT system.

The Rooster broke the story by leaking the company memo sent by President/CEO Joanna M. Pinkerton:

This is depressing. COTA’s leadership has spent the last year trying to reinvent itself as a Big Tech company, and they were apparently caught with their pants down in the event of a ransomware attack.

Re-issuing the last payroll is criminal. This ain’t 1991. The drivers, who have spent the last two years bearing the brunt of the so-called labor shortage, have now been screwed out of any extra time they worked to pad their last check before Christmas.

The most egregious line, however, comes in the first sentence of the third-to-last paragraph.

“Currently, the impact on our customers is minimal[.]”

Again, this would be true if we lived in a proper city where busses came every seven minutes. But this is Columbus, where our transit leaders can’t even meet the minimum expectations established by this city’s decades-long hatred of mass transit.

It’s a sentence that reeks of somebody who doesn’t ride the bus. Otherwise, they would know how unreliable the system can be, especially during peak hours when riders are most dependent the service.

Nobody at City Hall seems intent on doing anything to fix the issue, either. If the goal was to starve COTA out of existence so city leaders no longer have to pretend to care about mass transit, the plan is proceeding accordingly.

Not like any of them rely on COTA to get to work.

THOSE WMDs. Thousands of teens automatically enrolled into military junior ROTC programs… Putting Neanderthal cooking to the test… Trigger: The life and times of Willie Nelson’s guitar… Pork vindaloo recipe… Should Ukraine rein in its patriotic hackers?