Apologies for the inconvenience, but it looks like LastCall, our SMS service, is feeling a bit under the weather. More specifically, the portion of the service that reports Metro times has come down with a nasty bug that prevents it from returning usable data. Until we can fix it, we’ve set it to return an explanatory message instead.

The likely culprit? Subtle changes to the RideGuide website that interfered with LastCall’s fragile-by-necessity parsing routines. It’s irritating, but not unexpected — and it’s entirely possible that it will happen again.

So, while I’ve got this bully pulpit, allow me to do some bullying: Hey, WMATA! Listen! Please, stop spending your tech dollars building half–assed versions of services that local developers like my not-particularly-unbiased self have already written. Instead, just build an Open API and let a thousand geeky flowers bloom. It worked for Google. It worked for Flickr. It can work for you, too.

Remember, you’re in the business of providing effective and accessible transit to your customers. You’re not supposed to be participating in an endless, shallow and ultimately fruitless quest to have the coolest tech in town hosted at your website. That’s our job. Make it easier for the city’s nerds to give you free labor and they will.