Re: RE: Labor Board Issues Three Complaints Against WW1

[Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu>]

<<On Wed, 7 Aug 2002 13:50:43 -0400, Dave Faneuf <tklaundry@juno.com> said:

> If you accept anything less than top talent (that includes the knowledge,
> ability and willingness to gather accurate information just like in news)
> then what you end up with is exactly what you have now, fictional
> accounts of traffic in Boston.

It's not (or shouldn't be) the air talent's job to gather the traffic
information.  That's the job of the ``phone force'' call center,
scanner monitors, and the highway department.  Listen to a Chicago
traffic report some time: there are traffic speed monitors on all of
the expressways, and IDOT provides travel times for major
sources/destinations to all the stations (or their outsourced traffic
services).  Since Mass Highway and the Turnpike Authority are
apparently not prepared to provide this information, the only way to
come up with it is to go out and actually observe the conditions --
and you don't do that sitting in a studio in Cambridge.

Now, where the talent does bear some responsibility is in calling
roads by their correct names.  Every day in PM rush, you'll hear the
traffic reporters telling you ``Memorial Drive is backed up to the
Longfellow'' -- which would be a serious backup if it were actually
true.  (PM backups on Memorial Drive start at Western Ave. and tail
back eastward from there, so backed up all the way to the Longfellow
would be two miles of solid traffic.)  Of course, what they actually
mean to say is ``Land Boulevard is backed up to the Longfellow'' --
but they rarely if ever do so.  (I'll forgive them for getting Charles
St./Embankment Rd. wrong, since almost nobody knows those names and
even the MHD, BTD, and the MDC get them wrong most of the time.)

-GAWollman