Comment by 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 :)
I share your sentiment, but do not forget the nice things we do have ads are paying for.
Limiting it to this sort of context (deliberately excluding web stuff, where there may be more argument): I don't believe there is anything nice the ads are paying for.
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.
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.
Try copenhagen. They use the screen for ads and flash the name of the next stop for a couple of seconds between ads.