LinkNYC Misses the Bus

Inspiration has become hard to come by for me. I spend more time than most New Yorkers keeping an eye on the LinkNYC kiosks, as anyone with an interest in payphones probably would. LinkNYC has, after all, been dubbed by its makers the “payphone of the future”, a moniker I’ve seen come and go many times over the years with regard to countless devices that would have improved upon the homely old payphone. But almost any time I think to sit and write about what a mess the LinkNYC kiosk program appears to be my inspiration is foiled by the simple futility of the endeavor. I am not a journalist or a social media influencer with 80,000 followers, and as such I have no place in the discussion. As I mentioned a couple of years ago I and others once commented to the LinkNYC Facebook page that phone calls on these devices are horrible. I was not rude and neither was anybody but the conversation was nevertheless deleted, setting what has since been for me the standard of disconnect from reality that has characterized the company in its Smart City cloister.

But here I go again anyway with some observation on the LinkNYC kiosks, this time focused on the reappearance of the most profoundly useless blast of information I think I’ve seen on these screens. For a week or two in April the rotation of content on the LinkNYC advertising screens included approximate arrival times for buses at bus stops in the general vicinity of the kiosk, or so it was claimed. The April launch of this feature amounted to a confusing jumble of information that, with any scrutiny, turned out to be almost nonsensical. My instincts say that the arrival time data was placed for political and corporate boardroom brownie points. For the most part its appearance was announced by local media outlets with no questions asked as to whether or not it provided any real value. The removal of the bus arrival time feature was unannounced, as was its recent reappearance.

By my observation it seems like the chances of this data making a meaningful and useful connection with somebody is as good as hitting a jackpot on a slot machine. You do not know when the bus arrival time screens will appear, you do not know what information will be presented, and the 5 or 6 seconds you have to process it is simply not enough time. The best way I found to make sense of a LinkNYC bus arrival screen was to TAKE A PICTURE OF IT, then step aside and figure out what the hell I just saw. Needless to say I do not necessarily have a camera continuously at the ready so many more of these screens that I might have wanted to study blinked into oblivion before I could photograph them. That’s why this image is a little blurry. I got the shot from a distance just as the screen was fading to something else.

This was yesterday, outside the Citi Building in Long Island City, at Jackson Avenue and 44th Drive. The most relevant buses in this spot would be the Q39, Q67, Q69, and the B62. The Q100, Q66, and Q101 seen on this screen do not ever pass within a distance that would be considered reasonable to get to in a hurry. The Long Island City-bound Q100 is reported as being one stop away from its Queens Plaza/27th Street stop. Even if I was thinking of walking the several blocks from this spot to 27th Street to catch this Q100 I could not possibly get there in time. There would seem to be some relevance to the Jackson Heights-bound Q69 being one stop away from 44th Drive and 23rd Street, since that might have meant it was coming my way at the 44th Drive/Hunter Street stop at Rafferty Triangle nearby. If I had had my wits about me I would have looked out for that bus but this image, blurry enough on a computer screen, was unreadable on my phone. But the mere fact that I have to take a picture of it in order to have enough time to process this information says plenty about this application’s design and real-world usefulness. The Q69 is the only potentially relevant bus that appears on this screen but its presence would seem to be almost accidental.

Here is another much clearer screen from Columbus Avenue and 69th Street in Manhattan (note that the surveillance camera is taped over, as all cameras on the west side seemed to be).

This was not intentional on my part but I appear to have captured an M11 bus in the background just as the kiosk screen reported that an M11 was one stop away from the Columbus Avenue/72nd Street stop, a few blocks up from where I was standing. While any common sense individual would assume “one stop away” means the M11 was approaching 72nd Street what this seems to prove is that the bus has actually passed that stop. But whether that really is an M11 in the background or not I can say from observation that when these screens say a bus is one stop away that might mean the bus is approaching or it might mean it has passed. There is no way to know from these screens if a bus you might want to catch has come or gone, and the idea that anyone benefits from knowing that they missed a bus is Smart City posturing at its most ludicrous. This application was clearly planned by people who do not use the bus, for people who do not use the bus.

Another example from last week, this one at 30th Avenue and 31st Street in Astoria, seemed promising at first. The Q102 to Roosevelt Island, most observers would assume, should have been arriving at any moment. Again, I did not have my wits about me to look out for it, but any promise that data might have held is erased by the Maspeth-bound Q18 being 4 blocks away and not coming back. It feels like I missed the Q18 bus even though I had no intention of riding it. The Two Coves-bound Q18, by my interpretation, seems to be listed twice: At the time it was one stop away from 34th Street it would also have been two stops away from 31st Street. Confusing as always, but unlike the other examples this screen at least showed buses that were most relevant for this location.

All in all it’s as if we are supposed take some Smart City Zen comfort in knowing that buses we don’t need are humming along, one stop away, but whether that is one stop before or after the posted stop is a mystery. Forget about confusing, I find LinkNYC’s attempt at making itself look useful in this particular application to be irritating and, if I let it get to me, even insulting. How stupid does the Smart City think we are?

To keep it somewhat fair it should be mentioned that the source of this data is far from perfect. I encountered this reality yesterday, when looking for an M66 crosstown bus to get from the east side to the west side. The mobile version of the MTA Bus Time web site (which is the only bus arrival time interface that has ever made sense to me) showed no M66 bus anywhere up the line, and the $35,000 MTA countdown clock on 67th Street near Lexington showed nothing but dots where arrival time minutes should have been. Assuming no bus was coming I walked toward Park Avenue and, just by luck, happened to be standing at that M66 bus stop there when a bus arrived. It never appeared on the MTA Bus Time website. These vagaries, which can be confusing and even annoying, are nevertheless part of the reality.

But these kind of bugs have no bearing on the manner in which the LinkNYC kiosks are set to blast out incoherent information formatted in such a way that it is useless. This might win brownie points in the corporate boardroom but on the streets it does nothing. Having been so quickly removed after its initial appearance I would have thought someone at Intersection recognized its flaws and assigned someone to improve it, but it seems to be exactly the same product as in April.

Speaking of those $35,000 MTA-produced countdown clocks I noticed something strange when getting a photo of one of them. This happens when I point my camera at any of these MTA bus signs. The cameras is the Samsung Galaxy S9+. Social media friends tell me it’s a CCD mismatch, but I’m going with more of a poltergeist theory. The lights on that sign were not blinking but the camera for some reasons thought they were.