LinkNYC’s Bus Arrival Time Feature is a Smart City Headache

LinkNYC’s advertising panels today are stuffed with screen after screen of content. Some of it is intended to be useful, some of it is just for fun, but however meaningless its value all of it is it meant to get your attention and make you look.

Into a seemingly endless parade of fun facts and disembodied AP headlines comes what is billed as real time bus arrival information for MTA buses that pass within a 1/3 mile radius of the kiosk on which the information appears. At first blush this would seem to compete with the MTA’s project of installing bus arrival countdown clocks at bus stops all around  town. In truth? Not so much.

Here is what a screen looked like last week on Broadway near Steinway Street in Astoria:

You have to think quickly when a screen like this appears. You only have a few seconds to process its contents and plan your travel accordingly before the next screen filled with depressing poetry appears.

At Broadway near Steinway Street in Astoria LinkNYC told me the Sunnyside-bound Q104 was at Broadway and 33rd Street, one stop away. One stop away from what? I don’t know because this screen made no sense. If the Q104 was at Broadway and 33rd Street its next stop would be Broadway and 35th Street. After that the Q104 would stop at 37th Street. From there the Sunnyside-bound Q104 rolls on to Steinway Street, the stop nearest this kiosk.

Information for the Q101 seems to be about right. If the Q101 was at Steinway Street and 35th Avenue that would have put it two blocks from Steinway and Broadway, the Q101 stop nearest this kiosk. Hooray for the brave new world.

But when the kiosk says the Q66 is at 35th Avenue and Steinway Street, and that the Q66 is “6 stops” away, what the hell does that mean, and what am I supposed to do with this nebulous information?

The bus arrival time feature on LinkNYC was introduced with noticeably self-congratulatory fanfare, and the usual avalanche of “Hallelujah!” tweets and “Can I get an ‘Amen’, please?” retweets from the Smart City groupies, most of whom probably use neither the bus nor LinkNYC kiosks. This app appears to have been designed by people who do not use the bus, for people who do not use the bus, i.e. Smart City evangelists.

But one dissenting voice rose up at Bklyner.com, commenting that the bus arrival time screens “need some serious work.” Here is how Bklyner writer Paul Stremple put it:

But despite the congratulatory atmosphere, watching the brand new bus arrival display on the 5th Avenue and 13th Street corner, one quickly realized they need some serious work. Tracking the Brooklyn Bridge-bound B63 bus as it made it’s (sic) approach on the kiosk, useful information briefly available as the bus entered the Link’s 1/3-mile radius: it’s 4 stops away from 14th street, then 3, then 2, then 1 stop away as it buzzes past 13th. In that sense, the kiosks work fine.

But once the bus passed the corner of 13th, instead of displaying the arrival time for the next bus, the Link kiosk’s display simply tracked the vanishing bus further down 5th Avenue with each refresh: 1 stop away from 9th… 1 stop away from 7th… now 1 stop away from 5th… via Bklyner.com

I will give it another go but as of yet I have been unable to replicate Stremple’s experience because I have been unable (or maybe just unwilling) to stand and wait an indeterminate length of time for bus arrival screens to reappear on the kiosks. But his account might answer my questions about what the mysterious Q66 “6 stops away” number meant in the photo above.

The Q66 stop nearest to this kiosk is at Steinway Street and 35th Avenue. This kiosk appeared to say that the Q66 was there, at Steinway Street and 35th Avenue, while simultaneously being 6 stops away. I think what that means is that the Q66 bus had come and gone, and was presently 6 stops past Steinway Street and 35th Avenue, putting it somewhere around Northern Boulevard and 60th Street. That’s good to know, right? Could there be anything more existentially useless than knowing how many stops away a bus you missed has traveled? Is there a prize for missing the bus by the most number of stops?

The Q104 info is equally confusing. These screens are supposed to tell you how many stops away buses are from the bus stop nearest the kiosk. This screen seems to have correctly identified the nearest stops for the Q66 and Q101, but not the Q104. It does not matter from which stop the Q104 was one stop away, because Broadway and 33rd is not the nearest stop to this kiosk, not by three or four whole stops (depending what “1 stop away” meant, adding to yet another Smart City mystery).

If I am at Broadway and Steinway, armed with the information from this kiosk that the Q104 is one stop away from 33rd Street, and with no idea as to whether that means it is one stop past 33rd or one stop away…

I don’t know but this is giving me a genuine Smart City headache, and I am not kidding. CityBridge and LinkNYC continue to pummel my intelligence with their balderdash firehose of gratuitous, meaningless data, making me think my citizenship in the Smart City should be revoked on account of my stupidity.

Remember, too, that if I had not taken the picture above I would have only had 5 or 6 seconds to process the information on that screen. From there, if I did not just say to hell with it, I would have had to work from memory, and who knows what bus that might have led me to.

Having seen this new LinkNYC feature in the real world I think the odds of it manifesting a useful connection with someone looking to catch a bus are about as good as hitting the jackpot on a slot machine, which is not a bad metaphor for LinkNYC’s ad platters: Advertorial Slot Machines, albeit minus the jackpot for anybody but CityBridge and LinkNYC.

More evidence that these screens were planned by people who do not use the bus: As noted above, the screen showing how many stops away buses are appears for 5 or 6 seconds. It shows this info for as many nearby bus routes as can fit on the screen. It only shows this information for one direction of a bus route. So if you are at Northern Boulevard and Woodside Avenue wanting to know how many stops away the Q66 going toward Flushing is, and the kiosk screen shows how many stops away the Q66 going the other direction is, you would not only be out of luck but you might be confused into thinking you had just seen information about the bus you were actually waiting for.

Like most of content on these kiosks, the bus arrival screen is gone before you can even comprehend what you were looking at. Is this just bait? Having seen a screen like the one above do the Smart City gods expect us to gape at 25 screenfuls of advertisements and NYCFacts until the next bus arrival time screen appears, hoping that the next time around it includes status for a bus going the same direction we are?

If the appearance of one bus arrival screen was immediately followed by another one that listed arrival times for buses going the other direction that might be of some value, but only by a small increment. For the few moments these bus arrival screens are visible the odds of someone seeing them and making legitimate practical use of the information must be infinitesimal, per the slot machine metaphor. LinkNYC’s advertising screens are like an information casino. The planners of this bus arrival feature must have couched their end-of-year bonuses on the assumption that this information will blink by too fast for anyone to notice that it has zero value.

This feature was not intended to be useful for people who actually ride the bus. It does not and will not function in a way similar to the MTA’s arrival countdown clocks, although the chorus of Smart City joy that greeted its arrival of seems to have assumed that is exactly what LinkNYC’s bus arrival feature would do. This is what I would call an information nuisance.