I’ve always been curious about the expression “the other day”, used to casually refer to something that occurred on a non-specific day not long ago. The phrase is imbued with a strange mix of casualness and precision, implying with its use of “the” that there was only one other day besides the present: THE other day. This little linguistic quirk came to mind when I noticed the other week that Intersection’s LinkNYC kiosks started recycling factoids in their “On This Day” screens, bringing back anecdotes and historical footnotes from as far back as August 2, but also from several days into the future. From this screen on August 12 I learned that “On This Day” of August 18, 1896 Adolph Ochs took over the New York Times.

The OTD screens are showing up on the advertising billboards in such quantity that I have to ask if anybody at Intersection is even paying attention to this. I can understand leaving OTD blurbs from a day or two previous, if only to get some extra mileage out of whatever amount of research went into collecting and verifying them. But showing OTD content from days into the future and weeks into the past is not in the spirit of something called “ON THIS DAY”. The feature could be better called “In This Month” or, on a case-by-case basis, something like “On Tuesday of Last Week, 112 Years Ago: Something happened.”

Recycling OTD content is a bit like displaying weather snapshots from days earlier, right? Oh, wait. That is exactly what I’ve seen happen any number of times. On the day I got this picture it was sunny and about 90°. Try telling that to this LinkNYC kiosk, which announced that it was 70° and cloudy. The sun’s blinding reflection in the kiosk’s screen prove that it was sunny and mostly clear. That weather snapshot looked like it was from a few days earlier, before the heat wave commenced. If Intersection is not taunting us with ice cream truck music then they are trying to make us think cooler weather is on its way. Cruel.

Another weather-related quirk is how the tablet screen and the advertising billboards do not seem to want to talk to each other, or that they do not seem to get their data from the same source. The big screen gets its data from the Weather underground but it is not stated where information for the tablet’s weather bug comes from. For days the big screens all seemed to be locked on the current temperature being 93°, but the tablet screens reported more realistic temperatures in the low 80s.

Also on August 12 I saw, for the umpteenth time, that Gertrude Ederle was the first woman to swim the English Channel. Hooray for Ms. Ederle but is there so little advertising in the LinkNYC inventory that this and other OTD screens need to be shown so frequently? I must have seen the Gertrude Ederle blurb over 100 times since it first appeared back on August 6.

LinkNYC: Missing the Bus Revisited

Maybe it is just more evidence that I have no place in the Smart City, but I continue to question why the bus arrival time screens exist, and what honest individual could describe them as useful. The screens appear so briefly, and the content displayed chosen so randomly, that the only value these screens bring to anybody is that Intersection is able to claim they are supplying valuable real-time information without having to worry that anyone is paying enough attention to refute the claim. This feature was created by people who don’t use the bus, for people who don’t use the bus. The latter of those two camps will simply see or be made aware of these screens’ existence and repeat after Intersection that this is valuable, Smart City gold.

After last week’s sour rambling about about them I gave the bus time screens another chance earlier this week (you know, the other day) at an intersection where there are only 2 bus routes that matter. The Q66 and the Q101 both have stops at the intersection of Steinway Street and 35th Avenue in Queens. With just two bus routes there I thought there would be more possibility for a meaningful and concise display of arrival time information as opposed to a location with 4 or 5 bus stops nearby, where the quantity of routes made it all the more unlikely that information about the bus you were waiting for would appear, and for long enough that you could make use of it.

Let’s say I was waiting for the 19th Avenue-bound Q101, so I could rent out one of the rooms with a piano at Astoria Soundworks, as I sometimes do. Can I simply ask LinkNYC when that bus would arrive? No, I just have to wait. After a good two or three minutes a bus arrival screen finally appeared. I did what one must to make sense of this display: I took a picture of it then stepped aside to study what this kiosk seemed to think I needed to know.

This screen said that a Manhattan-bound Q101 was 4 stops away from where I am, but also 3 stops from the 34th Avenue stop, and 2 stops from the Broadway stop. I had imagined that a screen in a location like this, with only two bus routes in play, might be smart enough to tell me how many stops away the nearest Q66 buses were, and how many stops away both of the nearest Q101 buses were. Instead, as if I needed to know or could not figure this out myself, I saw that the Manhattan-bound Q101 is 2 stops away from a stop that is about a third of a mile from where I am standing; about a quarter mile from its next stop; and last but not least 4 stops away from the stop nearest to me. All I need to know is how many stops away the bus is from where I am standing.

There was no mention of the 19th Avenue-bound bus for which I was hypothetically waiting.

I went over to Steinway Street and looked north. Indeed, as reported by the kiosk screen, after a minute or two I spotted a Manhattan-bound Q101 making its way to 35th Avenue. Hooray for the brave new world. But wait: As that bus arrived there also appeared a 19th Avenue-bound Q101, the bus I would have wanted. Why wasn’t this bus’s imminent arrival shown on the screen? Then I looked east and saw a Q66 bus rumbling toward its Long island City/Queens Plaza destination. Why wasn’t that bus’s arrival shown on the screen?

The data points might as well be chosen at random and this, I think, is at the crux of why these screens do not matter. What could make these screens meaningful is if human intervention took place, where someone who understands how buses work went kiosk by kiosk and decided which routes get priority over others. In this case it would be a matter of instructing the screens to only ever display the next arrival times for the two routes that have stops at this intersection.

But that would involve human intervention and judgment, which is not the Smart City way. The Smart City depends on algorithms, automation, and a dash of randomness. I don’t think it would take an army of people to go kiosk by kiosk and figure this out, but to commit resource to such a project would not make sense since this feature would provide no tangible return to the company. By that I mean it doesn’t make any money, so there is no reason to put extra effort or financial resource into perfecting it. Instead the screens are put there as if Intersection is saying “Here. Here it is. You figure it out.”

The first screen I saw this day seemed to have at least shown accurate information, though its redundancy regarding the Q101’s multiple stops wasted screen space. The apparent randomness of what data points are chosen makes it seem just about impossible that something as efficient as the next arrival times for all four bus stops at this intersection would ever be shown all at once. If that is ever proven to have occurred I think confetti and balloons should rise from the kiosk, and from all of the ~1,800 LinkNYC monoliths.

The “accuracy” of the first screen was followed a few minutes later by this screen, which any individual with common sense would think indicated that another Q101, one stop away from the 35th Avenue stop, was on its way.

But no Q101 bus on Steinway Street was anywhere to be seen on the northern horizon. I know because I waited. What this seems to have meant was that the Manhattan-bound Q101 that had left 35th Avenue minutes earlier was, at that point, one stop past its previous stop at 34th Avenue, a bit of information of use to absolutely nobody. I do not know what the last item on this screen means, since the bus that had left 35th Avenue minutes earlier was more likely to have been at the Northern Boulevard stop and not 2 stops away from it. The 2nd and 4th items on this screen might have made sense if there was another midtown-bound Q101 bus coming but there was not.

In the approximately 10-12 minutes I took out of my busy day to perform this little test I saw only two appearances of the bus arrival time screens on this kiosk. I cannot see both sides at once so maybe there were other appearances, but the mercurial nature of these screens renders them something no person would consider reliable. If it was looked to by someone as a reliable source of information I think that that someone would, like me, find it irritating and even insulting. If this is the last time I write at any length about the bus arrival feature it does not mean that I will not continue to be a little irritated every time I see it.

The crutch on which this mess of information stood has been (and this is being very generous) the instruction on the bottom to tap the transit icon on the tablet for more information. That little note would seem to turn the content on the big screens into teaser-type material to get you to use the kiosk tablet, where more detailed information resides. You could, if you had patience and knew what you were doing, find a way to the mobile version of the bus arrival time page on the MTA’s website. That happens to be the presentation of bus arrival time that makes the most sense to me, and for now at least I can still get to it from the kiosk tablets.

But it looks like access to the mobile version of the MTA website will be replaced on LinkNYC kiosks with the new MYmta Android app. If the current version of that app is any indication it seems bus arrival time will not be included, for what possible good reason I cannot imagine. Assuming the Android app fully replaces access to the MTA website then information seen on the big advertising screens will be the only bus arrival content available from LinkNYC. I don’t know what good reason lies behind possibly replacing the MTA website with the app, although in my observations it seems that derelicts and people who appear to be slightly unhinged are frequently seen slouching against the kiosks, tapping on the transit status update screens, often for what appear to be long periods of time. Maybe this is another of Intersection’s ways of removing functionality in the interest of decorum. Removing the web browser did not eliminate the encampments altogether, but maybe the MTA website has been determined to be too much of a magnet for that sort of thing?

I wouldn’t have an answer to that but I have seen grumblings around social media that a lot of businesses hate these kiosks on account of the loiterers they attract. I would think this is especially true of any establishment that has outdoor dining. I’ve seen places where the kiosks might be 5 or 6 feet away from where people sit outside a restaurant. In that proximity I’ve seen individuals or group of people standing or sitting, sometimes what looks like 3 or 4 feet away from the outdoor dining customers, plugging their USB-powered speakers into the kiosks and blasting music from their phones. I don’t personally know any business owners who might have an opinion on or experience with this but I might ask around next time I’m at the Bel Aire Diner or Trestle, both on Broadway in Astoria and both with kiosks positioned for maximum inconvenience should anyone actually use the kiosks to, I don’t know, vote in a Participatory Budgeting program. I read somewhere that 5,000 people did that.