See, I think there are three problems here. Sorry, this is going to be quite a long post. Nothing new for me, but oh well.
The first (and most obvious) is that
people in the industry are obsessed with sounding 'professional' and being unambiguous, to the point where it's a fault.
A pretty much ubiquitous example would be the wet weather announcements. A personal (non-) favourite is from Stratford, where someone says something like this, often as often as once a minute:
"Customer information announcement: due to the current adverse weather conditions, customers are advised to take extreme care while moving around the station, as floor surfaces may be slippery when wet."
That. Repeatedly. If memory serves, it seems to
always be playing somewhere on the station. It does my neck in, and almost certainly makes people turn off or turn their music up.
A lot of the language used here is unnecessarily formal and wordy, for no real reason other than to be unambiguous ('floor surfaces', as opposed to other surfaces? 'Adverse' weather rather than wet weather? Use of the passive voice?) Here's an alternative version of that announcement:
"The floor is wet today. Please be careful."
This removes a lot of the unnecessary guff, and uses simple, short words which non-native English speakers, children, and people will learning difficulties are more likely to understand. It sounds less formal, but that's the point. The passenger's "ear-time" is at a premium, and if it sounds like it's going to go on forever, they're just going to turn off. Use that "ear-time" wisely.
The second problem, I think, is that
people often don't make announcements to solve a specific customer need. Instead, they make an announcement so they can say "I told you so" when something goes wrong. The audience is not the customer; it is their own boss, or their own legal department.
A non-rail example, but still closely related, can be found on London buses. Some context: Westminster Bridge is having protected cycleways installed, and this includes the Dutch "floating" bus stop design - the cycleway goes behind the bus stop, bus users access the shelter by crossing the cycleway. This way, everyone's happy: bus drivers don't have to play leapfrog with cyclists, your gran can comfortably pootle along to the shops on her rusty old Gazelle, bus users have a place they can wait that's out of the way of people cycling
and other pedestrians.
St. Thomas's Hospital decided this would be dangerous, and lobbied quite extensively against the scheme. Part of the compromise reached with TfL was that there would be an announcement on buses, warning bus users of the danger of approaching cyclists. This has now been deployed on
existing bus routes which already have the floating bus stops, such as route 25 (which parallels the CS2 protected cycle track between Aldgate East and Stratford.)
I'm not opposed to the idea in principle. British people aren't used to the idea of a floating bus stop. It's probably a good idea to remind people to take care… except, the announcement that's played on the buses plays at
every single stop that has a bypass. And it's unnecessarily wordy, too (see problem 1.) "Caution: there is a cycle lane behind this bus stop. Use the crossing point." As before, people simply turn off.
Maybe it could be better worded. As simple as "look out for bicycles when leaving the bus."
However, the question I'd ask here is
"who's the audience of this announcement"? Is it the bus passenger? Or is it St. Thomas's Hospital?
What's the announcement's primary function? Is it to tell a tourist getting off the bus to watch out, so they don't get mown down by your gran on her bike laden with shopping? Or is it to tell St. Thomas's Hospital that TfL have
thought about the hypothetical risk of people having to cross the cycleway?
The third problem, related to the second, is that
people make announcements as a 'default solution,' without thinking about what's actually causing the problem.
Let's examine the stairs example for this one. You know the one. "Please hold the handrail whilst using the stairs, and do not run or rush. It is advisable when using the stairs not to use mobile devices to send messages, watch videos, or play games."
As in problem two, what's clearly happened here is: someone fell and hurt themselves quite badly on the stairs; management tells middle manager "do something"; middle manager tells underling on the station "make announcement to tell the punters not to hurt themselves."
As before, this is more an announcement so they can say "I told you so" when someone falls over, hurts themselves, and threatens to sue for compensation. It won't actually do anything to avoid conditions where people with a dodgy knee end up running down the stairs, late for a train, well away from a handrail, lose their footing and go
thunk. And it won't stop someone from answering a text while descending the staircase and then crashing into someone else.
The answer here is not an announcement. The solution is to make adjustments to the stairs to add more handrails, reduce the trip risk. Or it's to install a lift, or an escalator, etc. Or maybe it's to install benches, so people have a place where they can sit down and answer texts/watch Game of Thrones/etc.
All of these cost money, which is quite hard to come by these days. An announcement costs very little. Unfortunately I'd suspect it's about as good as a placebo at actually making a difference - but it allows the station manager to say "well, I did something."
There are other problems too. Poor zoning, for instance (why does LUL advertise contactless payment to me while I'm already on the platforms, and have therefore already paid?), poor pronunciation, out-of-date announcements (eg for wet weather) playing, badly-adjusted microphones and speakers, etc. But the three things above are the main problems I've observed.
Sorry. This post got out of hand. I'll stop now.
(with acknowledgement to a certain cartoon character of long ago that few will remember).
