Back to the mk4s, I really don’t think people need mollycoddling to this extent. Preparing passengers for a change in the position of the carriage letter?! Patronising doesn’t even begin to cover it.
How dare the railway try to be more customer-friendly and remove some of the anxiety from train travel!
There's a lot of attention paid to the environment on trains themselves but I don't think we focus sufficiently on the platform environment.
With boarding a plane, it's easy/obvious where to go. There's a lot less anxiety about lining up at the wrong door or the wrong gate. There are people to assist you.
With boarding a train, once you've established which platform to be at, there's the hassle of working out where to stand - platforms are generally longer than the trains that serve them, it's not always obvious which end "First Class" is going to be at, you don't know where on the platform your coach will stop - you don't know where the doors will be. Compare the scrum at some major stations to the Jubilee Line Extension (or Sheffield Supertram etc) where passengers know where to stand before the service arrives.
BR had a nice idea with the yellow/red stripes above the window to make it obvious where First Class/ Buffet would be. That's very user-friendly (at minimal cost) and could save each service valuable time at platforms (as passengers can work out where a specific coach is before they are within spitting distance of the doors).
I think that a lot of enthusiasts (who do thousands of miles a year and are familiar with the different operations) forget how challenging rail travel must be to Joe Bloggs and are therefore a bit dismissive of something intended to help "normals".
I must admit to being mystified by the strong negative reaction to VTEC putting some stickers in a different place on one trainset. Some people seem to be getting really worked up over what is (in the grand scheme of things) quite a small detail.
One only has to glance at the level of detail in the
TfL Design Standards to get a feeling for how such subtle detail changes can unconsciously affect people's behaviour. You may think it 'patronising', but such subtle changes are effective.
Agreed.
The anti-VTEC stuff on here gets a bit silly at times. For example, there was a recent thread about how nice it had been for them to email affected passengers to inform them that the ex-EMT HST was running a service (i.e. preparing passengers for the lack of wifi, allowing booked passengers to travel on a different service) and that got responses along the lines of "well, why didn't they email me when XYZ happened". They can do no right in some people's eyes.
I'm sure that if East Coast had come up with these cheap stickers above the windows they'd have been hailed as visionaries!
TfL really do get it though, they understand how passengers think, they know that you sometimes need more than just one signpost to ensure that people find the right way through a station. Some on here maybe find that patronising, but I think that we need to improve the experience between "flashy website" and "nice environment on board the train" because the intermediate stage (arriving at the station, finding the next fast train towards your destination, knowing where to stand to board) seems to be the weakest link in the chain.
I’m not getting worked up, it really doesn’t matter all that much! I don’t think the stickers telling you where the carriage labels have gone are patronising in themselves, rather the perceived need to trial it on the existing stock; why not just put those stickers by the doors on the new stock? What’s the difference?
Plug doors?
And the fact that a sticker on the door might only be visible to those at the front of the scrum of passengers trying to board (whilst a sticker above the windows can be seen by everyone on the platform so that they can move along towards the correct carriage before the train has come to a halt, rather than waiting to get through the crowd of people at the doors only to then see that the coach in front of them is at a different end of the alphabet to the one they were wanting).
The only criticism I'd have of VTEC's changes is that this is the kind of thing that the railway should have been doing many years ago - regardless of the move to 801/802s - this is a simple cheap user-friendly move that will make life easier for passengers and we should probably have been doing it on InterCity trains twenty years ago - the fact that this is being done now though is A Good Thing.[/QUOTE]