Local News

MBTA Twitter account gets into haiku battle with San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York transit agencies

Sure.

By Nik DeCosta-Klipa

1 minute to read

Last week, for some reason, two major California transit agencies got into haiku fight on Twitter.

The battle began after San Francisco’s notoriously outspoken BART account responded to a complaint in haiku and then called out Los Angeles’s Metro account in another 17-syllable poem-tweet.

The Metro account responded—because managing a public transit agency’s social media is an otherwise thankless job—thus beginning a weird, fun exchange in which the cities’ respective basketball teams and traffic were called out.

Nearly a week later Thursday, the MBTA jumped in when a Twitter user shared an article about battle.

In keeping with the Boston-Los Angeles rivalry, the Metro account was dismissive.

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But the MBTA, for once, was not to be thwarted by external forces.

And then, the Boston account got an assist from an unlikely ally, as New York’s MTA jumped in to call out the warm-weather Metro.

The haiku battle puttered out after that, as the account managers likely had to get back to providing service updates and fielding complaints from riders.

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