The Dry-Erase Board — It Worked Well Enough On Your Dorm Room Door, Didn’t It?

Things you don’t want to read after Wednesday’s commute include MTA employees had to be reminded not to surf the ‘net so much while everyone else was trying to get service updates on the mta.info website:

Of course, the scale of New York’s subways, which deliver 4.9 million rides each weekday, dwarfs any other system in the country, making it much harder — and more expensive — for the authority to maintain and improve its communications system. On Wednesday, the authority’s Web site, one of the busiest in the country, was updated frequently and received a record 44 million hits. (A hit is a request for a single file on a Web server.)

However, untold numbers of people had trouble getting through to the site. The firewall software that screens users on the network could not handle the surge in traffic, so technicians tried to free up capacity by asking employees to limit their online activities and by disabling bandwidth-consuming functions, like videos of old board meetings, on its Web site.

“To say the Web site was down is not correct,” said Christopher P. Boylan, a deputy executive director of the authority. “It was just at its maximum capacity.”

And just so you understand, this is part of why the people in the little boxes never seem to know anything when you ask them:

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the PATH system, has since January been sending e-mail alerts to nearly 9,000 riders. They are notified of any delays of more than 15 minutes, and they can customize the alerts so they receive information only about the lines they use.

It will be a while before the Metropolitan Transportation Authority can do that for subway riders. “Usually when stuff happens, it happens quickly and we’d have to send out 100,000 e-mails very quickly,” said Wael Hibri, the authority’s chief information officer. “We’re still thinking it through.”

Here, then, is how word of major disruptions goes out for many riders: Employees stationed near train dispatchers make a telephone recording of the disruptions. The recording goes out to station agents, who are supposed to write down the information on white dry-erase boards in each booth using ink markers.

“We keep an ample supply on hand,” Termain Garden, a transit official, said of the markers.

Besides the boards, there are still other time-tested methods: the phone line, which plays recorded messages, and the public-address systems. (However, 92 of the 468 stations lack such systems.)