Comment by hiAndrewQuinn

Comment by hiAndrewQuinn 3 days ago

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I'm a software lead for passenger information systems on public transit. What that means is: The little screen that shows you what your next stop is, and the little voice clip that plays "Next Stop: Braintree" or what have you.

It's not quite as nice a feedback loop as ordinary web dev, but I've found a $20 webcam easily pays for itself many times over in this environment. This becomes all the more important as we start to build more advanced software functionality into our product offerings, which is where I really shine despite my undergrad in electrical engineering (I chose EE, like how aspiring writers choose to major in the classics).

thaumasiotes 3 days ago

> I'm a software lead for passenger information systems on public transit. What that means is: The little screen that shows you what your next stop is

Why does that screen always cycle through a bunch of worthless messages that hide this information, instead of just displaying the useful information ("next stop: X") at all times?

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  • hiAndrewQuinn 3 days ago

    Great question! The short answer is "Beats me, ask your local transit authority." They're generally the ones who call the shots on what actually gets shown on those displays, and we are the folks who implement that downstream.

    When I say "local transit authority", I mean organizations like the BART for the Bay Area, the MTA for Chicago, or the MBTA for Boston, my home town. The graphic designers in those places are often responsible for surprising amounts of the look and feel of a city's public transport, so I'm sure they would love to hear your feedback.

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walthamstow 3 days ago

I'm extremely curious about the nationality and residence of a person who uses Braintree (a town in Essex UK with a silly name) as an example but purchases things in dollars

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slekker 3 days ago

Thank you for your work! I always wondered how those worked, and where the info came from, on top of what it runs on etc -- moreover I love seeing software built that directly improves people's lives :)

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  • guappa 3 days ago

    Try copenhagen. They use the screen for ads and flash the name of the next stop for a couple of seconds between ads.

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    • chgs 3 days ago

      Adverts are a cancer on society, the reason we can’t have nice things.

      Reply View 7 replies
      • generic92034 3 days ago

        I share your sentiment, but do not forget the nice things we do have ads are paying for.

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      • grecy 3 days ago

        They can and have been banned in some cities. It’s glorious.

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      • rbanffy 3 days ago

        Capitalism causes cancer. That’s not even surprising ;-)

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    • rty32 3 days ago

      The (almost) same thing happens near Boston's South Station. There are some TVs that show timetables of upcoming trains/buses, except that they added ads. So, if you want to know how many minutes you have to catch a train, wait 30 seconds for the ads to be over first.

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    • slekker 3 days ago

      That's a shame, where I live we thankfully don't have ads on those!

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      • thaumasiotes 3 days ago

        The subway system I'm most familiar with has two systems:

        1. All cars have a configurable display that shows text. It is constantly scrolling through boilerplate that is not conceivably helpful to anyone, like "Don't spend too much time looking at your phone". But if you watch it for a minute or two, eventually it will briefly display the name of the next stop before going back to the boilerplate.

        2. Some cars, but not all cars, have a stylized layout of the subway line embedded over the windows. There are lights running between the stops, and those lights are red if that part of the track has already been covered and green if it hasn't been. The part of the track where the train is currently located, and the upcoming stop, have some other status, which I think is an unobtrusive flashing.

        The fact that this map display cannot show any information other than the current location of the car means that it shows this information at all times, making it millions of times more useful than the configurable text display that all cars have and fail to use appropriately.

        But there are no ads either way. There's just the good system and the terrible system. I would argue that software to control this kind of display is a fundamentally misguided endeavor - the more controllable it is, the worse the user experience will be, because the people controlling the display are not interested in the user experience.

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        • jaclaz 3 days ago

          Not that they couldn't reserve on the ads screens a narrow (let's say 100-200 pixels tall) band at the bottom of the screen to show the path with the green and red lights like the (good) ol' system.

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tapoxi 3 days ago

How does it know what stop it's at? Operator control? Signaling system?

MBTA related, I finally rode in a new Red Line car, are those radically different?

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