You are standing at 39^th Street and 7^th Avenue in Manhattan. You encounter one of several LinkNYC Smart City kiosks along the Avenue. Having heard that LinkNYC delivers advertisements, 2rd grade poetry, (sic) and – most important to you – bus arrival time information, you decide to use this particular kiosk as a source for seeing when or where you could catch a bus nearby.

You have not yet hurled a brick at this machine but what you will soon experience might inspire you to do so.

The “Local Bus Arrivals” showing up on LinkNYC kiosks in Manhattan’s Garment District include the Q31, Q6, Q30, and Q60, all approaching Sutphin Place and 91^st Avenue in Jamaica, Queens, over 11 miles away. If you have the grit and determination to navigate the tablet’s recalcitrant wayfinding app you would find that getting to these “Local” buses will take over 3½ hours by foot, about an hour and twenty minutes by bike, 40 minutes by car, or anywhere from 30 minutes to about an hour by train, which could take you 15 or 20 minutes to get to from where you are standing.

I know. It’s a glitch. The first time I spotted this I shrugged it off. Glitchy shit happens, and the Smart City with its arsenal of automated ping bots can detect these problems and fix them pronto. Right?

How about no? Seemingly random “Local” bus arrival screens have appeared on LinkNYC screens all over town for almost two weeks now, since I first spotted one in Astoria on Thursday, April 25^th. The next day I managed to get to my camera fast enough to grab this shot of a screen at 37^th Avenue and 33^rd Street in Astoria showing bus arrival times for far-away Jamaica.

Now, almost two weeks since, I continue to see these senseless “Local Bus Arrivals” all over Manhattan and Queens, with the stunted algorithm behind these screens seemingly obsessed with buses approaching Sutphin Boulevard and Archer Avenue. Props for the candy-colored icons for at least making this useless information look mouth-watering.

Looking for a bus at 2^nd Avenue between 61^st and 62^nd Streets? The Smart City is here to help! There’s a Q9 4 stops away from Sutphin Boulevard and Archer Avenue, a mere 10 miles away!

So, New Yorkers who rely on LinkNYC for bus arrival time info will just have to wait for this to be fixed. Or will they? Am I the only person in town who has noticed that these giant screens have been blasting out meaningless and distracting informational irritants for almost two whole weeks? Does anybody consider these screens useful in the first place?

Even when the bus arrival screens work as intended the odds of them registering useful information to anyone passing by are about as good as hitting a jackpot on a slot machine. I have specifically put these screens to the test and they failed every single time. You simply cannot expect these screens to deliver on the seemingly obvious expectation that they will present content of use to you in catching a bus.

First, as described previously, you have to stand and wait for an unspecified length of time for a bus arrival screen to appear. That is what you do. You wait, basking in screen after screen of grade school poetry, disembodied headlines from the Associated Press, and platitudinous celebrity quotes about New York that make this place sound like Adam and Eve still walk here.

When the bus arrival screen appears you have to be alert, and ready. That’s assuming you even made it this long without giving up. You only have 7 or 8 seconds to process the content of the Local Bus Arrivals screen before it disappears. Arrival time for a bus you need to catch might appear on the screen, or it might not. You just don’t know, and by the time you think you might have processed the content of the screen it changes to an advertisement for Bourbon, which either drives you to drink or makes you look for a brick to throw at this stupid machine.

I solved the problem of not being able to process the content of a screen before it disappears by taking a picture it. That is exactly the ludicrous kind of hack one must be ready to execute to attempt to make these screens useful.

After taking a picture of the screen you must spend extra time to study and understand what its almost cryptic code says. Translated from symbols and abbreviated text into English what these screens typically say to me is something like: “A bus you cannot possibly catch is now arriving at a stop ½ a mile from here”. Or: “A bunch of buses going the opposite direction as you are 5 stops away from a bunch of bus stops you walked past 10 minutes ago.”

A lot of people probably see these screens and think “Ah, the Smart City is stepping in to improve life for bus commuters. Isn’t that lovely?” Those people probably do not use the bus. These screens look promising at a glance, and I’d be happy to hear from anyone who finds them reliably useful. But if you submit the functionality of these screens to even a little bit of scrutiny you’d find they do the opposite of what a Smart City machine should do. These things are supposed to solve problems and make our lives easier. These screens actually create problems by wasting your time.