Anyone who rides the New York City subway knows that you pretty much never know when the next train is going to come.  You get to the platform and hope you didn’t just miss one.  For the most part, its just random luck (although schedules apparently exist in some secret location that even train operators and dispatchers don’t have access to).

All this could change one day.  Today, unfortunately, is not that day.

New York City has been testing a system on the ‘L’ line for the past couple of years.  It is composed of a combination of electronic signage and audible announcements that tell you when a train is coming.  The funny thing about the system is that whether it is wrong or right is about as random as when the trains come.

As a frequent ‘L’ train rider, I routinely observe the following.

• “Ladies and gentlemen, the next ‘L’ train is now arriving on the Brooklyn-bound track.” Really?  Where is it?  Oh I see, you meant it would be arriving in 7 minutes.  I get it now.
• “Ladies and gentlemen, the next ‘L’ train is now arriving on the Manhattan-bound track.”  Uh…  wait, the train is right there?  I thought this was the Manhattan-bound track…  Am I wrong?  Let me hold the doors and delay the thousand people on this train while I ask around?  Oh, it is, the robot voice is just an idiot.
• “Ladies and gentlemen –”  What?  WHAT?  [seriously, the computer voice actually cuts itself off]
• “Ladies and gentlemen, the next train will not stop at this station” First of all, why not, and is that just the next train? Second of all, it did stop, and it always does even when this announcement is made.
• “Ladies and gentlemen, the …[train flies by]… minute.” I couldn’t hear any of that.
• The screen says 0 minutes until the next train.  Where is it?
  

And on and on…

0 minutes -- but no train yet... maybe in a few minutes this sign will be right, just like a broken clock is right twice a day.

The lack of information that New Yorkers have become accustomed to is bad enough.  But the false information is so much worse. From a psychology point of view, this phenomenon can be described using prospect theory.  This basically says that people feel worse when they lose something than they do when they gain something of equal value.  In this case, people feel a little better than before if they get the information about trains, but they feel a lot worse when this information proves to be useless.

What does this have to do with design? It illustrates that designing something wrong is often worse than not having designed it at all.  Not only does this system not work, but if it ever works in the future, people probably won’t trust it very much.  The fact that the train system and the public address system appear to be operating independently of each other is a complete design failure.  If designed well, it should be virtually impossible for the inherent linkage of the systems break so miserably.

You must be careful to consider all aspects of the problem at hand before attempting to solve it, or you can actually make the problem worse.  Now, the unreliable announcement system only adds to the already prevalent noise pollution in New York City.

For now, I wish they would just turn it off.