Let’s talk public transport
Yesterday, I spent a large portion of my day on trains, specifically Transport for Wales and Merseyrail trains and I have to say nobody even considered neurodivergent people at any point of any process in onboarding the new fleet stock or thinking about day to day ops and if they did they lost the notebook that had their notes in. Here are my observations from the day on these two service providers..
1. On train announcements. They are either too quiet or too loud, they are not preceded with any auditory sound to say they are coming it’s just noise out of the blue
2. Lighting. Mersey rail. Why on earth do you need to repeatedly turn the lights on and off for the smallest of bridges, in the late evening your comfort lighting is used on normal track but then out of nowhere bright white light. Why? If you need to use this lighting why not fade it on so it isn’t a stimulation nightmare.
3. Another Mersey rail disaster. Who thought that facing all the seats in one direction and putting the screen with the train stops up on the roof was a good idea? Not only are they are eye level for absolutely nobody they are so small you have to actually get up to read them, absolutely useless.
4. No idea who manages lime street station but has nobody ever heard of signs?
5. Another lime street disaster, if your going to close the signposted method of getting to a platform make it easy to find an alternative route, not everyone is happy with elevators, alternative routes would have been way better on your signing than a life story on why your replacing the 100 year old escalator…a QR code for anyone interested would have been great.
6. Station staff. You need to find a way to turn off the grunt o meter on these people. I don’t understand grunt so if you want to see my ticket ask for it and they should really be wearing a uniform that makes it clear who and what they are. Black clothing with a hi vis and camera isn’t gonna cut it, if I have to scan someone’s body to find their job title, something has gone wrong.
My local station now has people wondering around in pink hi-vis vests checking tickets, no idea why but they do, maybe some signs Transport for Wales to give people a heads up what these folk are up to, because anyone can pose as station staff, it isn’t hard, oh and they are checking tickets of people entering the platform but some bright spark but the self service ticket machines on the platform themselves, why these are not outside the platform area is beyond me.
7. TFW you have some useful screens on your trains but they are not really utilised very well, we were on a train to Chester why does the screen show me departures in Birmingham? We’re not even going to Birmingham, surely departures and platform information of the station were actually approaching would be so much better.
8. On train temperature. Either have the heat on or have the air con on, being cooked and then cooled at pace is uncomfortable at best.
9. Lime street again, why signpost your underground stations at street level with letters for example A, B, C then when you get down there it is a name E.G northern line I am now super confused because I am looking for platform A
There is so much you could be doing better, both of these services are running brand new train stock and I don’t think any of the engineering team thought about comfort or neurodivergent people when they were being built or designed.
There are some small wins here that you could definitely implement easily to make things easier, but some of them you’ve just totally missed the mark on – maybe try asking people who actually use your service next time.
If either company wants to reach out for a discussion on how to make things better.