TIL German timetable screens suck
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Well, it was yesterday that I learned that at Berlin ZOB, if it's 23:59, your bus departs say at 00:01, and you need to find out from which platform does it depart real quick, you're going to have a hard time because the screen always shows only the current hour and not NOW()±30 minutes like the screens in apparently-less-civilized countries east from Germany do.
Also, the computer running those tables does not know what NTP is, and it's clock is a few minutes behind. Double fail.
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Using Public Transport Infrastructure in Berlin
I am sorry but you done goofed. You are in Berlin, sometimes you are lucky if the busdrivers don't just go past you and ignore you because they don't feel like stopping. And thats only the human factors. Berlin is pretty broke and public transport infrastructure is one of the biggest budget cut areas. It is of course still better than anything I experienced in any american or canadian city, but that's not a hard thing to do.
Next time expect nothing or you will be let down. Allways check your own clock, allways be paranoid about the departures and allways plan for the next s-bahn or bus not to come because of raisins.
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@wft be happy they're using screens and not an old piece of paper stalled to the wall?
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@Tsaukpaetra If it were on paper they'd have all the information there.
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@Quwertzuiopp said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
You are in Berlin
That already means you're fucked.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of our capital.
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@asdf This is sadly not a website about disliking Berlin: http://fu-berlin.de
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@aliceif At least there's a song about it.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nIgbxIfg9-0
(Actually, half of the songs on the album contain at least one line about how much they do not want to live in Berlin.)
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That reminds me of a nice from French railways (or at least suburbs trains) screens: they've decided that a train should be removed from the screens whenever it enters the station. Even if that's 15 min before it actually leaves the station.
We've discovered that the hard way the other day: we arrived about 10 min early and didn't see the train on screens, so we were already halfway to build another complicated solution to drive to another station when we had the idea to ask, and be told that the train was already on the platform, nothing wrong with it. Just... no longer on the screens.
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@remi said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
That reminds me of a nice from French railways (or at least suburbs trains) screens: they've decided that a train should be removed from the screens whenever it enters the station. Even if that's 15 min before it actually leaves the station.
We've discovered that the hard way the other day: we arrived about 10 min early and didn't see the train on screens, so we were already halfway to build another complicated solution to drive to another station when we had the idea to ask, and be told that the train was already on the platform, nothing wrong with it. Just... no longer on the screens.
That's OK. In Lille, the departure times for the trams will sometimes disappear from the screens before the tram arrives.
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Don't you get a ticket with all the info you need?
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@wharrgarbl said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
Don't you get a ticket with all the info you need?
I can only speak for the British system, but typically, the tickets don't include the platform the train is departing from.
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@RaceProUK our bus tickets don't have any mention of trains too
(But they have the bus platform and time you're going, or had, it's been years since I've been there)
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In Warsaw public transport is actually pretty great. Connection net is rich, buses arrive on time (mostly), timatables on tram stops show how far trams are in minutes, subway arrives every 4 minutes during rush hours.
Yeah, except when you travel by train... then you're royally fucked.
I commute to work by train, so I use it twice a day at least, and I'm constantly amazed that there are no american school style massacres on the stations every month.
Just from today:
There are 3 minutes before my train departure, plenty of time to walk to the correct platform.
Voice announcement "Train xyz is leaving the station", timetable reads "xyz: leaving".
People run like mad to the platform (who knows when the next train will arrive), they get there heavy breathing and shaken - but there's no train, of course, it didn't arrive yet, it will in 3 minutes (well, maybe).
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@MrL said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
Yeah, except when you travel by train... then you're royally fucked.
Can't be worse than ours:
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@wharrgarbl Ours used to look about like that, but a few years ago there was a major effort to relieve congestion, so at least it's now always possible to get on, and usually possible to avoid inadvertently sexually assaulting whoever you're standing behind.
I organise my hours to avoid peak hour travel, so I almost always get a seat and it's quite nice.
The main problem with public transit here is that it's largely arranged on a star kind of layout; the major routes, and particularly all the train lines, go to the city centre. There's not much in the way of cross-connections. The recently elected state government had improving the transit system as one of their major promises, including building a rail spur out to my area, so it'll be handy if that happens.
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@wharrgarbl Looks like a couple of hours after rush hour ends on the London Underground
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@MrL said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
buses arrive on time (mostly)
Except the 112 going south. Fuck that bus with a potato.
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@MrL said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
@wharrgarbl said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
Can't be worse than ours:
Yes it can.
I think Pakistan has that beaten:
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@RaceProUK said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
I think Pakistan has that beaten:
I never find any consolation in thinking that 'someone somewhere has it worse than me', but yeah.
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@RaceProUK said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
I think Pakistan has that beaten:
What's not shown there is that there is no train, it's all one huge mass of people walking down the track
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Come to Hamburg. No such problems here.
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@Quwertzuiopp said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
sometimes you are lucky if the busdrivers don't just go past you and ignore you because they don't feel like stopping. And thats only the human factors. Berlin is pretty broke and public transport infrastructure is one of the biggest budget cut areas.
Clarification: ZOB is not affected much by the city bus service shenanigans as luckily buses that usually depart and arrive there are operated by someone else. But the station itself has this bit of a fractured mind designing it.
My hypothesis is that whoever programmed it got coerced to do that for erbärmliche Geldsumme or got annoyed with the local bureaucrats and thus did it to the letter of requirements, forgoing any UX considerations.
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double post removed because stupid notebook touchpad
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@MrL said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
I never find any consolation in thinking that 'someone somewhere has it worse than me', but yeah.
It's the other way around, if there is very few places doing it right, then I know it's hopeless
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@MrL said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
Voice announcement "Train xyz is leaving the station", timetable reads "xyz: leaving".
I guess voice and timetable service operates full-automatic there.
I was doing a project once that did train station voice broadcasts. The requirement was that there was accessible manual override to each and every part of the thing, for precisely this reason. And a trained human kept tabs on the system all the time.
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@wft said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
And a trained human kept tabs on the system all the time.
That would require someone from railways to care. Not happening around here, now or in foreseeable future.
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@asdf said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
@Quwertzuiopp said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
You are in Berlin
That already means you're fucked.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of our capital.
Is there a noticeable difference between old East and West Berlin?
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@boomzilla said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
@asdf said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
@Quwertzuiopp said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
You are in Berlin
That already means you're fucked.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of our capital.
Is there a noticeable difference between old East and West Berlin?
The traffic lights.
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@Jaloopa said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
What's not shown there is that there is no train, it's all one huge mass of people walking down the track
Nah, you can see bits of the train exterior. But I assume it's a Flintstones-like vehicle which is basically just a shell for all the walkers.
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@RaceProUK said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
I think Pakistan has that beaten:
But do they have penis seats‽
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@coldandtired said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
@MrL said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
buses arrive on time (mostly)
Except the 112 going south. Fuck that bus with a potato.
Major cities generally don't have much of a problem with keeping the busses running on time. Smaller cities, well...
In my hometown, not only is the table positively retarded (the stop next to my house has 10 lines leaving from it, and still manages to have stretches of 1-1.5h of nothing coming followed by 3 or 4 busses at once), but it's almost a tradition that the first snow means the entire public transport screeches to a grinding halt.
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@wft said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
My hypothesis is that whoever programmed it got coerced to do that for erbärmliche Geldsumme or got annoyed with the local bureaucrats and thus did it to the letter of requirements, forgoing any UX considerations.
They probably went for the lowest bidder. The actual text of the law says: "Choose the lowest bidder within a reasonable price range"
This is usually shortened to "Lowest bidder, come hell or high water" and then leads to the result that the work has to be done multiple times over. For instance, the demolition of a former factory in my hometown saw the consecutive bankruptcy of three demolition companies.
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@Rhywden said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
For instance, the demolition of a former factory in my hometown saw the consecutive bankruptcy of three demolition companies.
To be fair, it was a wrecking ball factory.
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@Quwertzuiopp said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
Next time expect nothing or you will be let down. Allways check your own clock, allways be paranoid about the departures and allways plan for the next s-bahn or bus not to come because of raisins.
This is my experience with German railways too. I hadn’t used them in about a decade, but last October I had the great joy of having to catch five German trains over two days, and each and every one was late by between 5 and 20 minutes. Which is really nice when you have 3 or 4 minutes to change trains at the next station, where there’s one train an hour going your way. (I was actually kind of happy the train before the last changeover was ten minutes late when I got on it, but twenty minutes late by the time it arrived, as that meant a shorter wait for the next one.)
Funniest of all, I mentioned this a few days later to a friend of mine who’s a railway traffic controller in a better-organised country (in this respect anyway), and his response was, “That’s what I always tell people and nobody ever believes me!”
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@wharrgarbl said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
Can't be worse than ours:
Try googling “super dense crush load."
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@hungrier said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
@Rhywden said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
For instance, the demolition of a former factory in my hometown saw the consecutive bankruptcy of three demolition companies.
To be fair, it was a wrecking ball factory.
It was made with Java?
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@Maciejasjmj said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
In my hometown, not only is the table positively retarded (the stop next to my house has 10 lines leaving from it, and still manages to have stretches of 1-1.5h of nothing coming followed by 3 or 4 busses at once)[...]
In my hometown we have some local bus lines, which are very short. The line I use the most is a short loop, with one stop where the bus waits for the next run. Going round the whole loop takes the bus 10-12 minutes... and it's not uncommon that it arrives 15 minutes late at my stop
it's almost a tradition that the first snow means the entire public transport screeches to a grinding halt.
Yeah first snow always disrupts Warsaw train schedule. And very low temperatures. And rain. And unexpected sunny weather. And phases of the moon. And sometimes there's just no reason.
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@boomzilla said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
penis seats‽
My research seems to indicate a strong market for that...
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@Gurth said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
when you have 3 or 4 minutes to change trains at the next station
Keeping trains running on time is difficult… unless you add a lot of waiting time at each station. IME that's the Swiss and Italian approach. I can contrast it with the British approach, which is to stop trains short of their destination if they're too late (it largely works if there's another more on-time train behind fairly soon).
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@dkf said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
@Gurth said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
when you have 3 or 4 minutes to change trains at the next station
IIRC this changeover was just to the other side of the same platform, in which case it wouldn’t be a problem — unless the train is more than about a minute late …
Keeping trains running on time is difficult… unless you add a lot of waiting time at each station. IME that's the Swiss and Italian approach.
I didn’t know Italian trains moved at all. Anyway, this also seems to be the Dutch approach, though last December’s schedule changes have meant some of those waiting times have been cut — with the same problems when a train arrives late.
I can contrast it with the British approach, which is to stop trains short of their destination if they're too late (it largely works if there's another more on-time train behind fairly soon).
Is that why I see a lot of British comedy concerning Southern Rail?
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@Gurth said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
Is that why I see a lot of British comedy concerning Southern Rail?
In order for trains to be stopped before their destination, they have to be running in the first place.
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@MrL said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
Yeah first snow always disrupts Warsaw train schedule. And very low temperatures. And rain. And unexpected sunny weather. And phases of the moon. And sometimes there's just no reason.
WKD or SKM or PolRegio?
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@wft said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
@MrL said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
Yeah first snow always disrupts Warsaw train schedule. And very low temperatures. And rain. And unexpected sunny weather. And phases of the moon. And sometimes there's just no reason.
WKD or SKM or PolRegio?
Koleje Mazowieckie (Mazovian Railways).
SKM crews actually act like they care. It's far less probable that SKM train will arrive late or will stop for unknown period in middle of nowhere.
But they are employed by the city, not by KM, which explains their different attitude.
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@dkf said in TIL German timetable screens suck:
which is to stop trains short of their destination if they're too late (it largely works if there's another more on-time train behind fairly soon).
Wouldn't that force all those people into the on-time train, making that train take longer at stations, making it late. And repeat.
Wait. I sense something... It's by design! There's not enough trains, so they fake people into believing there are!