ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[ac3r]

Am I in the minority in thinking this is not that hard to use? The payment systems might take a few minutes the first time, but it's not much harder than an ATM. And to pay your fare, you tap the card and ideally wait to check the screen to see what it says, just like an Interac machine. Just about every person in the country knows how those work.

The only thing that has ever caught me off guard was while adding funds at the machine. It is most likely my own fault for not clearly reading the message that tells you once you've paid you need to tap your card again to complete the transaction and add the funds. I forgot to do this and of course my funds weren't added, until I went down to the new customer service centre to get it fixed up. So in this case, the card holders show their usefulness.

But everything else? It just takes pushing some buttons and reading what is on the screen. If opening the doors of the train is even confusing to people (I don't know why, because to exit the bus you interact with the door), I blame the user for not having common sense, not the design. And so I can only blame the user for not having patience to read the screens when paying for products or paying a fare.

Bolded for emphasis. Something simple shouldn't be complicated at all. And from what I hear, even if you're doing everything right, you need to have 3 hands (one to hold your debit/credit card, one to hold your fare card, and one to hold onto your possessions), which is very poor design, and pity the person with any sort of disability with an arm (and I have worked with such) which makes the process impossible.

As for the train and the buttons to open the doors, I think most people are used to having train doors, or indeed any sliding door, open automatically, not manually. And it's not something people are used to, as they're not looking for signage nor buttons when then come up to a sliding door. I went to the CNE this year, and here I was teaching people how to get onto the TTC's LRT, as no one knew, and they have had their trains for a while. 100% of the sliding doors I've encountered have been automatic except these LRT's.

Yeah some places have them, particularly in North America. In Europe, a lot of countries have them operate manually and it isn't a big issue. Of course, this is new to residents here so it's taking some learning, but eventually everyone is going to know except people visiting or who rarely use transit. I suspect the reason we went with manual operation is that with automatic doors, you are losing a lot of the climate control each time they're open. If 4 doors are opening at each stop (or more, when we start running the trains in pairs) then you are letting out a lot of climate controlled air and letting in a lot of humid summer air or frigid winter air. Same with rain, blowing snow or heavy wind. It's something most people want to avoid on their commute to work. By having only the doors people want to open open, the train stays more comfortable and uses less energy.

As for needing three hands, that is true and I remember a discussion earlier in the thread about the machines lacking a card holder. It does put people at a disadvantage. Hopefully they can fix that up on all the payment machines, the same way Presto ones are.