Don’t Hate Her, She’s Just the (Subway) Messenger

Nonsense.

Other train systems manage exactly that. In Japan being even a minute late isn’t acceptable. This isn’t some impossible fantasy thwarted by human nature.

Your comment is exactly what I’m talking about. The MTA has managed to train us to accept this awful state as unavoidable and natural. Don’t buy their bullshit.

> They use a 90s style unbearably slow ticker display. So if you catch a glimpse at the wrong moment you're stuck reading all the unimportant garbage while trying to figure out whether the message is even relevant to you.

BART in the SF Bay Area is the same. The tickers slooowly scroll through repeated public service announcements and ads before eventually showing the train ETAs and current time for five seconds. They should show that important information all the time.

How about the English one, copied from [1] with an example train included:

"May I have your attention please on platform 1. We are sorry to announce that the nineteen-fourteen South West Trains service to Windsor and Eton Riverside has been cancelled. This is due to a failed train at Richmond. South West Trains apologises for the inconvenience caused."

At least some parts of that one are useful. I found hearing things like "This is a safety announcement. Due to today's inclement weather, please take extra care whilst on the station. Surfaces may be slippery." and "Security personnel tour this station 24 hours a day." very annoying.

(And I said "English" intentionally. You can at least double the length of these, Welsh first, in Wales.)

[1] http://automatedannouncements.wikia.com/wiki/Generic_Station...

The best display technology IMHO is the old electro-mechanical split-flap. They update pretty fast, and they make one hell of a racket when they do so everybody in the train station knows when something updated (this is a feature). They're sufficiently versatile to display information a train station needs to. They also have a certain aesthetic that simply cannot be touched by modern LCD/LED displays.

I wonder if that's a limitation of the (likely ancient) systems they pull the data from, or just a terrible convention. Even a vertical refresh, one complete line at a time, would let you show a lot more updates to the passengers than a horizontal scroll.

It indeed is, in a way German culture is very similar to something like Japanese culture, where the social form is way more important than actual intent/content.

For the same reason, the German language has very complex honorifics [0].

Some Germans take real offense if you don't address them with the proper honorific or forget to list one of their, oh so important, honorific titles on some text communication.

Because of this, there exists quite a lively market to sell honorific titles, specifically aimed at German-speaking users [1], in that regard there still exists a very real "class distinction" in Germany.

Stuff like that always makes me wonder how much influence population density has on the evolution of such strict social dynamics.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%B6flichkeitsform#Die_H%C3...

[1] https://title-town.eu/

When living in Germany, I found that the Germans were quite blunt in comparison to the United States and discarded a lot of the word fluff and fake friendliness that I often see people using in the United States. They prefer to be direct and get to the point. There was no need to beat around the bush and hint politely at something. So the attitude of getting rid of the meaningless words and stick directly to the information seems like a very German attitude to me.

However, I also found (particularly in written contexts) that the Germans were really big on formality. If you don't use their proper titles, they'll get very upset. If the paperwork doesn't have an official stamp on it, it's meaningless waste paper. If it does have an official stamp on it, then it's holy and undisputed, no matter what nonsense is written on it. I'm surprised that there isn't a flourishing fake official stamp black market because of the importance people place on those things.

I find that all the fluff in German written documents revolves around formality, rather than fake politeness. I always got the feeling that all those extra, meaningless words and phrases were more about doing it the proper, formal way (no matter how meaningless that was), whereas in the United States, the people are much more informal, but use a lot of fluff words to convey fake friendliness.

German academic writing is ridiculous. There's so much formality and academic vocabulary involved that they'll write long, complex sentences with fancy vocabulary to convey a simple concept. It's about as formal as you can possibly imagine, so it's wordiness and complexity has to compensate.

> Yeah, it's almost surely a case of remembering the handful of times when the clocks were inaccurate because they caused you trouble, while forgetting the hundreds of times when they worked correctly.

It absolutely is not availability bias, as demonstrated by the concrete data included in one of those links.

But even if it were - the whole point of having those signs is to alert you about the actual state of the subway, factoring in delays or service changes. Otherwise I could just download the PDF of the scheduled train times from the MTA's website and look at that. (Yes, those exist. There's almost no reason any person would ever need to look at them).

> They do work correctly most of the time, and the A division works even better than the B division, as you'd expect. (the opposite of what OP claimed.)

No, that's not the opposite of what I said. The A division is the IRT lines. Those are the ones that use the ATS system (which was outdated even at the time it was rolled out), and that's why the IRT lines (the ones with the LEDs on black background) are at least somewhat useful. Even if the train is delayed from its normal schedule, the times posted there are supposed to be somewhat accurate because it's using the ATS signal data.

For the B division (the BMT lines), you might as well be using the static PDFs that post the idealized train schedules[0]. I am not exaggerating; that's literally the data they are displaying. Once in a blue moon, for very serious delays such as a train accident, it will tell you that a train is "delayed" instead of telling you the updated ETA, but that doesn't help, because you want to know how long the train will take, rather than just the fact that it's "delayed"[1]. Most of the time, though, it won't actually update the time at all, and it'll keep displaying the wrong estimate until the train is literally about to pull into the station (at which point it'll skip straight to "0 minutes away").

The reason they don't tell you more information is because that information doesn't exist. They don't know where the trains are, beacuse the BMT lines use outdated signaling technology that's decades old, and the MTA has stonewalled all efforts to upgrade them[3].

So, in short, the BMT countdown clocks are useless because:

* They only publish the scheduled times, not the actual estimated arrival times

* Only about 50-60% of BMT trains arrive according to the times posted on those schedules

* For the remainder, it usually displays the wrong information, because it doesn't have any way of knowing that the information is out-of-date

[0] http://web.mta.info/nyct/service/pdf/tacur.pdf

[1] Saying a train is "delayed" doesn't give me any useful information, because I already know that about half the trains are delayed. And since it doesn't tell you what the scheduled ETA was, telling me that it's "delayed" from the scheduled ETA is also pretty useless[2].

[2] If the train is scheduled to come in 20 minutes, but it's been delayed by five, that's different from if it's scheduled to come in 3 minutes, but has been delayed by 10. Those two situations are displayed identically on the BMT countdown clocks, with no way to distinguish between them.

[3] The official MTA party line is that they want to wait and do the really expensive, comprehensive, state-of-the-art overhaul. In reality, that means that they've been saying this for nearly thirty years, and have actively fought all attempts to provide quicker and cheaper ways of achieving the same end results.