Dear GO Transit:
As you know, on trains travelling westbound on the Lakeshore West line, not every car can disembark at Appleby station. You address this situation by reading out the numbers of the cars that aren't going to open their doors at Appleby and asking people in those cars to move towards the middle of the train .
These instructions are not helpful. First of all, not everyone who gets on a GO train knows where they are relative to the middle of the train. If the train was already on the platform when you got there and you walked out of the stairs directly onto a crowded and narrow platform, there isn't an opportunity to step back and take stock of the whole train. You just think "Oh good, I didn't miss the train."
Second, the order in which you read out the numbers of the non-Appleby cars gives the impression that people should move towards the back of the train. I can't articulate exactly why it does this, but there were three other people on the train - all competent adults and native speakers of English - who got this impression as well, and waiting for the train home I met two more who had had the same problem on their outbound train. We all found ourselves at the back of the backmost car, staring through the inter-car door at a locomotive, entirely uncertain whether we'd ever be able to get off this train. There then followed a frantic sprint back towards the front of the train, through four moving train cars (and some of us find walking between moving train cars kind of scary), me in dress up shoes that I didn't expect to be sprinting through a moving train in, entirely uncertain whether we'd a) ever make it in time and b) were even running in the right direction. We did make it, but if there had been luggage or reduced mobility or small children, someone would have been left behind.
The people most likely to misinterpret your instructions are those who don't travel that line or that station on a regular basis. These are also going to be the passengers least equipped to find their way if they end up getting off at the wrong station. You get it wrong for these people, you've stranded them somewhere completely unfamiliar and likely ruined their day (and interfered with the plans of whomever or whatever they were going out to a strange city for).
So what you need to do is:
1. Instruct these passengers to move towards the front (or, if applicable in other situations, towards the back) of the train even if their ultimate destination is the middle, giving them the number of the first safe car so they know when to stop. It's better to have people wandering a car or two past the middle in the right direction than to send them off even further in the wrong direction.
2. Read out the numbers of the non-Appleby cars in the opposite order of what you've been doing. Just do it. If six people that I encountered yesterday were confused by it, others will be too.
Sincerely,
The girl who now has blisters
2 comments:
I have an even better solution. The Lakeshore West typically leaves on track 4 or 5, and sometimes on 9. That means they could put signs on two platforms to try to inform riders before they board the train to move down the platform if they're going to Appleby.
They used to do this on the Milton line, because that train always left on the same track. But it seems like they might as well cover a couple of platforms and get people on the right car from the start.
I agree that the on-train announcements are useless, especially for people who don't ride the GO all the time.
That would be so helpful as long as they also did on-train announcements. I made it to the train at the last minute so I didn't have time to run four cars along the Union platform either, but it would have helped all the normal people who made the train on time.
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