The Globe has an article today on the public announcements on the MBTA, specifically the ones never heard:
In an enduring problem for the one million people who daily use the MBTA, the transit system is still struggling to communicate with its customers. State transportation officials say the situation will improve in about a year, when a new fiber-optics network is in place that will allow better communication among stations and, in turn, to riders….
In the meantime, riders are mostly left with an outdated public address system bleating announcements that are notoriously difficult — or impossible — to understand.
‘’People don’t understand what’s being said,” said Khalida Smalls, coordinator of the T Riders Union, a passenger advocacy group, who hears complaints about communications as often as any other aspect of service. ‘’People just kind of tune out.”
As some would point out, this is hardly news. Still, I don’t begrudge the Globe the story. Sometimes pointing out the obvious is a necessary step in changing it, particularly with an entity as lumbering as the MBTA. Furthermore, it makes us think about something we do know but tune out.
The article doesn’t fully make this connection, but beyond the technical difficulties that make the T’s PA system sound like a drowned antique transistor radio, there seems to be one generating principal for communication failure: the MBTA overloads riders with announcements that it feels like it needs to get across rather than information that riders feel like they need to receive. Perhaps a good if incomplete analogy would be the corporate client, who in approaching an ad agency, insists on cramming a print ad full of information about their product, not realizing that white space would serve them better. Sometimes less is more. No one seems to stop to think whether twenty more exhortations a day not to leave parcels behind does anything useful. It’s just the duty of the MBTA to do its part for “safety”.
Conversely pro-forma “duty” announcements are unmatched by the kind of information commuters need on a daily basis. Once I checked the MBTA website when the closing of Huntington Avenue forced the E line to run forty minutes behind schedule: no mention in the update section. (You can, however, find out which escalators are broken). And the T seems slow to realize that information on train location would be a better use of expensive electronic signs than flashing Mass FEMA’s phone number. That disconnect with the common experience of commuting strikes me as an equally grave problem as the malfunction of speaker equipment.
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