[OR: What happens when you don’t engage in Design Thinking]
Much has been written (often here) about the decision to install fare gates. Most of this has been to suggest that they are a bad idea – they don’t solve the problem of fare evasion (or maybe they could, but their cost is greater than the cost of the fare evasion, so whether this is a win is up to your viewpoint), and a number of other knocks on the system.
It turns out there is one more.
It turns out there is one more.
TransLink keeping Compass Card gates open for paralyzed users
“TransLink has really dropped the ball. TransLink didn’t think through how the Compass Card could be implemented so that everybody could use it,” says Tim Louis.
The lawyer and former Vancouver city councillor says he’s a regular SkyTrain rider, but since January 1 he’s been taking the bus instead, in the company of his care attendant.
Fare gates are bad for AAA accessibility. You don’t say.
And what is the solution?
As a temporary fix, TransLink is leaving at least one of the fare gates that can accommodate wheelchairs and scooters, open at all SkyTrain stations. But for disability advocates, it’s a move that brings up safety concerns.
One of the reasons quoted for installation of the fare gates is the safety of the system. One other reason was to cut down on the cost of security and having to have fewer officers posted at stations. Neither of these is now possible.
Craig Langston… A past member of TransLink’s Access Transit Users’ Advisory Committee… fears foot traffic will gravitate to the open disability gate and increase the potential for collisions with motorized scooters and wheelchairs.
I remember doing a social engineering experiment in High School while working on the school newspaper (I loved that hall pass!), and selectively propping open doors in hallways. Its was frankly shocking to see the lengths people will go to aim for the open door, walking significantly out of their way just to avoid opening one. So this proposed gravitation is not surprising.
One solution proposed is to have an attendant at each station, all the time. I’m not an accountant but this might cost quite a bit. Just sayin’.
And bringing things back to yesterday’s Design Thinking piece:
Meantime, Louis says other parts of the world have found a fix for this.
“There are products on the market that can read the equivalent of a Compass Card from a distance so you don’t even need to take it out of your pocket and the reader reads it as you sail by,” he claims.
We chose to reinvent the wheel instead of using what is proven elsewhere? That’s never happened before has it?
(also, these long range card readers … those wouldn’t have worked on the busses, would they?)
/Insert eye roll…
Foot traffic certainly gravitates towards the open gate, I know I do. I take the train every day and basically never tap in or out of the skytrain because I just go to that one open gate. I have a monthly pass so I tap once, I’m charged for the monthly fare, and then it’s irrelevant if I tap in or out ever again on the train so I never do. So, they still get their money, but can’t track my movements /insert devious face
I’m personally tired of criticism of Translink operations. It’s like complaining about the weather. It’s easy to second-guess any decision ever made by anyone in the history of ever. The gates are a dumb, true, but they were a political inconvenience foisted onto the agency. How they operate and the decision-making that goes into choosing and managing these systems is complicated and difficult. To blithely say that “others got it right” is to not grasp that: 1) “others” operate under completely different budgetary, political, and development contexts than Translink, and 2) “others” don’t have it as rosy as most lazy complaints assume.
The hardware/software packages available to transit companies are in fact devilishly complex to implement and maintain on a limited budget. Choosing the particular combination of card-reading technology and its supporting infrastructure for your transit agency is a difficult process. It takes hundreds of separate factors into account – such as cost and convenience to the user, compatibility of existing infrastructure, and the ability of the agency to service and maintain these systems 24/7/365 in perpetuity. The ‘Compass Card-from-a-distance’ technology that “Louis” masterfully-cites may exist elsewhere, but how much does it cost to install and maintain? Was it for an entirely new system or was it integrated into an existing one? How reliable is it? Do you honestly think that Translink engineers didn’t consider all types of technology before settling on this imperfect compromise? Their fingers were shoved too far up their noses to see straight? People who throw such ass-minded complaints into the wind don’t ask such questions. They’re just wearing saggy diapers that leak.
Legitimate criticism is fine. But too much criticism floating around about Translink is just plain dumb. It’s irksome (clearly).
Translink was forced by the provincial government to buy the compass card. No competitive RFP was issued. And yet why does the translink and mayors get the blamed for this? This is all the provincial liberals fault.
Translink is forced to do a lot of things. They have very little real autonomy, yet are the public face for every crappy transportation decision the liberals make. I’ve heard several people blame Translink, with a straight face, for the Port Mann Bridge tolls. A Trumpian display of logic.
So true, when the Massey Tunnel is found to be a white elephant, translink will get the blame assuming the liberals are in power.
Author
This isn’t a criticism of translink operations per-se – it is a criticsm of poor design.
Yes, of course things are devilishly complicated. But devilishly complicated or not, some design decisions aren’t that hard to anticipate. At some point, doing the math on:
X know processing time * Y approx. number of people getting off a bus at once = Z
If Z is too high, then you don’t need to make a large leap in logic to see there is a design issue.
This math would have been done to design the number of fare gates at each skytrain stop – why Burrard has more than Main Street has more than 29th Ave. Since the bus issue seems to have emerged out of the blue, thats a design thinking issue, or more specifically a lack of design thinking issue.
This isn’t bashing on translink. This is critiquing design.
In this case, the designers know who they are designing for. If the design doesn’t accomodate those people, thats a design issue.
“Do you honestly think that Translink engineers didn’t consider all types of technology before settling on this imperfect compromise?”
Yes, I do, I see all the time in architecture a failure to know what products are out there, a failure to think outside the box, a failure to consider all users, and I think its entirely possible that all avenues weren’t explored. History is littered with products which were ‘well engineered’ failures, and I honestly think that many of those resulted from a lack of holistic consideration/knowledge of both problems, and available solutions.
There is a great book, the Philosophy of Everyday Things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things … which talks at length about exactly this mindset (or lack thereof).
And before we go saying how hard it is to find a long-distance RFID reader … 3 seconds of googling finds several, it’s not an uncommon issue, the real question is, was the design question asked which would have led to the issue being thought about – and I have seen nothing which would suggest that it has.
Sad thing is some conservative commentators and public will not perceive it that way and blame translink/mayors and not the provincial liberals.
For the last month I’ve been riding subways all across China — the best I’ve ever ridden. Every station has gates and every rider has to tap in and out when they use the system. Every gate assembly has a wide lane for the disabled. The tap pad on every gate is well back of the gate itself so that a person in a wheelchair can easily tap before entering the chute. I watched literally thousands of people use those systems every day with virtually no screw ups in the gates or the ticketing system, no matter whether people used multiple-ride passes or one time tickets.
Up to this point the Chinese systems aren’t much different than the Compass system. But here’s the thing: in the Chinese systems, even when the gates and ticketing systems worked flawlessly, there were always screw ups of one kind or another on the people side of the equation. People who couldn’t always figure out the ticket machine (me), people who couldn’t always figure out the system map (me again), people whose paper money wasn’t in the right denomination for the machines (me and a lot of other people, probably because the machines were dumbed down to only take 10 yuan bills because they’re not as popular with counterfeiters as the ubiquitous 100 yuan note).
In short, there were people with problems in every station, all the time, as in every station in every system in the world. And for those people, the Chinese have provided, well, people. A station attendant in every station who gives out change all day, who helps people navigate the system, who presumably watches for security problems. (There are security people as well, of course, because it’s China and they x-ray every bag going in and out of the system, but the security people don’t do anything else).
As far as I can see, even when systems work flawlessly, people won’t, and for those people we have to have people. Without those people, the Compass system won’t work, even if it works flawlessly.
I don’t know whether it’s “poor” design.
I think it’s a foreseeable consequence of the decision to install faregates (whether you agree with that decision is a different story).
Bottom line: We went from a “barrier-free” system to a “barriered” or “restricted access” system. Access was free flowing and easy to navigate with a barrier-free system – it is not designed to be as easy with the gates.
You can’t expect the same freedoms you had once you install barriers – they are walls.
The same people will also have to push elevator buttons to move to and from the platform.
As to a long range card reader – NO WAY!
If I have a spare Compass card in my pocket or wallet (or, in future if they move to open access, allowing credit cards to tap) I don’t want a “distant” reader charging each/both of my multiple cards for the same trip.
I want to restrict charges to instances where I undertake an specific action (tapping / swiping) to initiate a payment transaction.
Author
Well, there’s a logical way that a long range reader could work – make it swipe out only. Mount it to the outside of the bus, so it is shielded from the inside (the metal bus acting like a nice faraday cage), and then only when you leave the bus do you trigger the end of trip. Antennas are often inherently directional, after all, and so can be the reader.
Would that be an acceptable to you? I can’t off hand see how this could result in anything but a premature ‘swipe out’, and so cause anything but a bank error in your favour. That way you lose no control over the transaction, and the only thing you lose is the visual verification that you have swiped out – a problem for which I’d imagine a good solution might be ‘there’s an app for that’.
Not that its anything but a moot point now, or anything to get paranoid about either.
There is another problem, though, and that is other RFID-capable cards – such as credit cards and some office access cards. They cause problems even with short-range readers, much less long-range ones, and often confuse the fare reader enough to produce an error even when there is a perfectly good compass card there as well.
Possible solutions:
– If an attendant is near the gates – easy – the customer can request assistance and the attendant can open the gate (i.e. like the turnstile bypass gates in Toronto’s subway, but the TTC has a fare collector in a booth at each station)(Note that TTC still does not have elevators at all stations).
– if no attendant is near the gates – maybe a call button to call an attendant to open the gate (the customer will have to push elevator buttons, so a call button is no different). Response time will vary depending on where the closest attendant may be. The wait is an inconvenience, but so is calling HandiDart. Remember Granville Station didn’t have an elevator for many years – and an inconvenient shuttle was in place for years.
– if no attendant is near the gates – but the paralyzed person in a wheelchair is viewed on video surveillance cameras from the SkyTrain control room, can the gate be opened remotely? But this raises a proof of payment issue.
The places I have taken subways or trains have either fare gates AND and an attendant or they have no attendants and no fare gates. I can’t see how fare gates without attendant will work because somebody or something will go wrong every day, from people not being able to operate the fare gates to strollers, suitcases or bikes stuck in them.
Over 15 years ago airline check-in staff in Hong Kong started to place a small sticker to each bag of departing passengers. Imbedded in each tiny sticker is radio frequency identification tag, enabling the airport to know that all bags destined for each flight were actually aboard the right aircraft.
All airlines use the system.
Over 60 million people pass through the airport each year.
This technology is now cheap and simple, unless you want to make it complicated by running it though months of committees and middle-level bureaucrats.