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Paris: Customer Service as Modern Art

Posted on July 11, 2010 in General

Sometimes automated customer service is so bad that it becomes a kind of modern art.  Today, arriving at Paris’s Gare de l’Est to pick up my pre-booked electronic TGV ticket, I discovered that the machines for this purpose didn’t like my credit card, so I was told there was no choice but to wait in the general ticketing queue of the SNCF (the French national railway), which took about an hour.

The queue gave me plenty of time to study the row of ticket windows, mostly unstaffed, and the convenient electronic signs above each one.  As often happens at airports, these signs were mostly saying irrelevant things.  One sign, for example, specified international sales, and another domestic sales, even though we were clearly all in one queue and they were just taking whoever was next.  The faux-order conveyed by these signs is harmless enough, as long as nobody takes them seriously. Continue Reading →

u.s. transit capital funding: a big picture?

Posted on July 8, 2010 in Philosophy, Strategic Transit Planning, US Federal Policy

An email asks a seemingly eternal question, from reader Aaron Brown:

I … wanted to reach out to see if you’d be willing to provide any thoughts on the massive capital funding backlogs that major transit systems face here in the US. The latest reports I’ve seen throw around numbers above $50bn just to bring systems into a state of good repair, excluding any expansion. Given the current condition of local, state, and federal budgets, this number seems extremely daunting to me.Here in Chicago, for instance, we have a pretty solid transit system (relative to most US cities), but one that is old and badly in need of repairs. Again, however, the amount need just to bring the system to a state of good repair ($7bn for the CTA alone) seems overwhelming. We have aging buses and railcars, tracks and ties in need of replacement, and an L system with structures over 100 years old that are all competing for limited funds. And this is in a city and transit system that is seeing record ridership and will need to expand over the next few decades to serve one of the largest (and growing) metro areas in the country. Continue Reading →

Amsterdam: Victory is Orange

Posted on July 6, 2010 in Amsterdam

Hello from a hotel room with a great view of Amsterdam’s Central railway station, and of the intricate tangle of tram loops, canals, roadways, taxi queues, bike lanes, and subway construction sites that make up Stationsplein (“station square”).  The Netherlands triumphed over Uruguay in the World Cup semifinal about fifteen minutes ago.

There aren’t many cars in Amsterdam, because the city simply doesn’t make room for them.  But every car in my field of vision, maybe 20 or so on all sides of the square, is honking.  (It is the sort of moment when you wonder why carmakers couldn’t tune all horns to an agreed set of standard pitches, so that when everyone honks at once we’d at least get a pleasing chord.)  I can also hear a lot of happy shouting, a few things that sound like brass instruments, and the occasional vuvuzela.  Continue Reading →

Singapore: Mysterious, Providential Buses

Posted on July 2, 2010 in Branding, Legibility, Singapore

[Slightly revised 22 August ’10 to eliminate some innocent mistakes.  The overall naive tone of this post was intentional; this was, after all, my first full day in Singapore, so I was seeing as one sees when first trying to figure out a network.]

My first transit adventure in Singapore began in at the remote wetland reserve, Sungei Buloh, in the northwest of the island.  It’s adjacent to a curious area called the “Kranji Countryside,” billed as Singapore’s “homegrown agritainment hub.”  It’s a small patch of farmlands and vineyards designed to serve all the agrarian tourism needs for the 5 million people living just down the road.   Continue Reading →

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