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Old September 24th 04, 09:14 PM posted to uk.transport.london,uk.railway
MIG MIG is offline
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First recorded activity at LondonBanter: Jun 2004
Posts: 3,154
Default Technology for its own sake?

(MIG) wrote in message . com...
"Ian Johnston" wrote in message news:cCUlhtvFIYkV-pn2-9bQzpFIyRbud@localhost...
On Thu, 23 Sep 2004 13:05:59 UTC, "Jack Taylor"
wrote:

:
: "Ian Johnston" wrote in message
: news:cCUlhtvFIYkV-pn2-01opgFJcdpZb@localhost...
:
: Or having the stupidity to be blind or partially sighted, eh?
:
: Most visually impaired people are intelligent enough to make enquiries
: before they join trains and join them at the appropriate place to disembark

Well, what's so wrong with arranging things so they don't have to?

Ian


The alternative is to stand at doors that aren't going to open, so how
would it help? Or do you mean rebuilding the stations?


Actually, I think the real issue is do we trust a railway industry
which can't display the correct destination on the train to tell a
visually-impaired person whether it's safe to step out? If not (I
think not) why let over-sophistication cause operating problems?

Today, Barnehurst to Victoria service (375/9) consistently displaying
something line "Mind the gap. We will shortly be arriving at Cannon
Street." Well, the gap between Cannon Street and the entire route of
the journey was pretty big. If any on-train information system
crashes just after the last piece of locational information it
receives, whether from GPS or anything else, is anyone going to bother
about it or warn the passengers?