On Wednesday, the MTA will vote on a measure to enable subway riders to specify their home station and time of day they ride, and be able to get relevant service alerts via SMS to their mobile phone.

Thats great – and, quite frankly, way overdue, but probably not terribly useful.

Why? Because in my experience with MTA, the problem with service disruption communications is that they aren’t able to handle it in a realtime fashion on *their* end, so utilizing realtime message delivery systems is kind of useless.

A perfect example are two major events that happened late last year – the October morning flood, which was probably one of the worst NYC commute disasters in recent memory, and the steam explosion near Grand Central later that year.

In both cases, my wife and I as commuters ran head-on into both service disruptions well after they had initiated, while there was absolutely no useful information about them whatsoever on the MTA website for a long time.

Other commuters – radio – television stations – other websites – all were much better sources of information then MTA itself.

So, who cares if they add subway SMS alerts? They could use psychic transmission and they still wouldnt be able to get information to us in a timely manner.

Another reason why this service isnt very useful?

Unlike most other major underground transit systems throughout the world…SMS DOES NOT WORK ON THE SUBWAY.