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Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

Nitpicking, there've been shady "urban mobility" apps before.

Remember that one which told you which platform your train at eg Penn Station was likely to come in on, so you could wait on your track instead of in the designated waiting area? To put it in clickbait terms, "station operators HATE this", because there are a variety of safety and efficiency problens with people waiting on the platform, even when it helped the user be the first on the train.

(I have no idea what is going on in this case.)

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Your apps/schedules don't tell you the platform? Here (GER & NL), they always tell you the track - be it official apps or the paper schedules - and all waiting areas are on the platforms themselves. Utrecht is the only exception I know, where there are still larger designated waiting areas outside the platform (tho the building is on top of the platforms, so you basically wait next to the escalator)

At Penn, the track is not announced until just a few moments before the train begins to board. This is ostensibly because the platforms are too small for people to wait on them, but it also has the side effect of keeping crowds up in the waiting area with all the shops.

The waiting area is on top of the escalators at Penn as well, but since you don't know which track you need to wait for, it is always a mad dash down the corridor for your train once the track number has been posted. This is made even worse by the fact that by the time the track number appears, there is only 3-5 minutes before departure of the train, so there is a sense of urgency required to get to the right place before the train leaves.

It is pretty terrible, but so is everything else about Penn.

in china, each track has their own designated waiting area. so you do know which track you need to be on and you can be as close as you need to be to catch the train, and yet people are not filling the platform before it's time to get on the train.

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