I've had a mass transit fetish for so long that I'm not quite sure where it started. At the deepest roots of it are probably Big Bird taking the subway from Sesame Street to the Central Park, really, but somehow it stuck. Even playing the original SimCity, I always tried to force my wee residents to give up their archaic asphalt and use 100% railways. I <3 rail.

Living in Phoenix, it's always been one of my greatest frustrations that our mass transit system is so cruddy. Maybe I idealize the transit in other cities. It's easy as a visitor to say, "Gosh, this [comprehensive public transit system] sure is great!" But the convenience of four separate bus lines going from my house to my office is about where the coverage stops; anything off the beaten path becomes unrealistic.

So today I'm rather excited (for once) to work for a newspaper, since I've managed to get in on a smallish group who are visiting the new light rail operations center today. I'll be meeting the heads of the operations group itself and hopefully figuring out what sort of data they'll have on train locations/activity, and then finding a way to build that data into our site so people can easily check schedules and whatnot.

From what I hear, the schedule is pretty simple. It's a single circuit to start, and any given station is expected to have a train arrive at least once every (x) minutes. We'll see if it actually turns out to be so easy.

In any case, I looked at the meeting itinerary and noticed this: "OMC tour and train ride." Woohoo! Big Bird and I are gonna go to the park!!