[asdff]

I think about this all the time every time I see an lcd screen in my local train stations. If people who designed them actually used transit, maybe they'd have the signs you can only see as you walk out of the station say something about the bus lines you'd transfer to, instead of when the train behind you that just departed from is set to arrive. At some stations the screens they installed don't display anything useful at all, not when the next train will come, just the date and time as if everyone doesn't have that in their pocket, and this needs to be displayed every 25 feet on the platform.

A lot of transit could be fixed by just taking a regular routine user, empowering them to become a dictator for a week and point out all the friction points they hit actually using the system. But then that would make the entire bureaucratic system that is the transit agency look like idiots who don't understand their own jobs, so it will unfortunately never be done.

[wpietri]

For sure. I think a lot of this is just about how heavy the planning cycles are. A lot of stuff like that is developed through big, waterfall planning efforts and large outsourcing contracts. Most of the choices were made before they had their first user, and once it's all installed any revision would be a) expensive, and b) a black eye for the people in charge.

And in some ways I don't blame people for doing this, because you need really supportive stakeholders to work in an iterative fashion. Otherwise you get a ton of nitpicking that amounts to a lot of "why didn't you guess 100 perfectly everything up front" and "how can we start if you can't give me a full plan and a firm price?" In a blame-hungry environment, waterfall is the safest choice for the people doing the project.

[asdff]

I think a lot of projects have adopted a ritualism around an ideal that only exist in renders vs actual learned pragmatism as well. Despite these glaring shortcomings that I really must not be the only one to realize, the system still creates new stations or other infrastructure beholden to the same shortcomings. Pro transit journalists have their work cut out for them: it's so easy to ding these builds on a usual laundry list of items, but somehow the engineers are like automatons who blindly follow prescription probably from a higher form of government and one again, never seem to test the system beyond simulation I'd presume. How do you fix this? It seems so fouled from the top authority mandating stupid infrastructure to the bottom subcontractors who are hired to implement these plans and use their influence to perpetuate such byzantine planning, where they will be the most qualified contractors to bid on future projects. The inertia of these maligned incentives seems insurmountable. Everything seems so rotten and hard to fix without a total reset.

[wpietri]

For sure. One way I'll talk about this is, "The biggest fantasy novels I've read are project plans." Everybody coalesces around a vision quite detached from reality and then just kind of lives in it for years. It's a weird sort of collective arrogance/faith.

There are alternatives, though! In Rother's "Toyota Kata", he describes a Toyota practice where they pick some far-off goal (which I think is called a "target condition"). That can be something that nobody knows how to do. Then they take one step in that direction and reassess. Over time the path might be somewhat wandering as they learn what works and what doesn't. Or they might revise the goal based on new knowledge. But they keep going, step by step.

That's a lot like short-cycle iterative software processes. Which I know work, because I've used them for many projects. But even software, which is infinitely soft, often gets the same sort of fantasy-driven planning.

I think you're right that the ultimate problem is how authority behaves, and at least in the US there's a terrible managerial culture that this is embedded in. My solution has been to find small pockets of sanity, but I've not figured out how to scale that up. But you might find some hope in this Mary Poppendieck talk, where she explains that it hasn't always been this way: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/tyranny-of-plan/

[mncharity]

"Which way do I go?" orientation signage in the Boston subway system has been less than wonderful. A lot of "the obvious thing needed here is ..." not happening. Places you could stand to help confused and grateful tourists. So tempting to do a self-adhesive-vinyl signage project. And then the DNC did.

When the Democratic National Convention came to Boston (2004), the subway got a lot of nice "which way do I go? what are these stairs? if not these, then where?" temporary orientation signage. It lingered afterward, with some becoming permanent signage, and others puzzlingly not. Such an event involves massive interdepartmental communication, tight timelines, altered incentives and constraints, and additional resources. Some of the altered communication channels are said to have persisted. I might be interesting to look at events where things are "shaken up", to better understand the steady-state tangle.

[nerdjon]

I feel like almost every screen I just ignore, either it was just put there for ads or it is wrong/broken.

It is now a fairly regular occurrence to have a train show up that the screen had no reference too existing a minute or two before.

But yeah it feels like they were not designed or setup by people that actually use the trains and were setup by a comity thinking they know best.

Maybe that is the big difference, in other countries the people using it are also the ones managing it?

[rtkwe]

The big issue is putting those screens in isn't just a simple task, you need the entire support and switching network to be able to track individual trains which is a relatively new thing in terms of the age of many of the subway swtiching and train tacking (where those even exist) systems in the US.

[asdff]

Honestly a big issue seems to be in other countries, especially ones like Japan people frequently site as the model for public transit, transit is privately run and developed more pragmatically/more profitably. There wouldn't be sense in adding useless screens with useless information, but there sure would be a lot of consideration on how we can make our station more attractive than a competing line's station, paring down overhead to its most base items to further that goal.

Whereas here in the US, its like transit departments are handed budgets generated by tax dollars but no clear direction or plan for how to maximize those dollars. So they have to turn to subcontractors who eat through the pile of money like a vulture eats carrion. This is a system that over time lobbies to further entrench and sustain itself and becomes impossible to rip out and restart. If you go advocating for privatizing the transit system you'd be likened to Judge Doom before people stop and think for a second of what that would actually look like: the shinkansen for example.

[xcrunner529]

Well and lots that don’t even take the transit they manage. It’s just so infuriating.

[asdff]

Metros would rather build a sprawling parking lot for their bus and train operators to park their cars in, than to ask why the local metro system is such a nonstarter to so many of the metros own employees.