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Contributing: Karen, Richard, JMV.
Designer and Researcher Stephanie Vacher sums up the design challenges of buses nicely, drawing in commentary on buses in New York. The lack of standardization is mostly to blame for the extremely high price of city buses, and because no two cities are going to come to a conclusion on regulations for emissions, consideration for people with disabilities, fare collections, etc., this means that new designs must be created to fit the guidelines set by individual transit companies. Commissioning a company to build a bus that is city-specific is a massive undertaking, wherein every detail has to be submitted to maintain consistency among the fleet of buses, and meet new regulations that change on a regular basis. I once overheard a driver describing the New Flyer Trolleys as having components from all over, like Germany, and the buses as being assembled in Winnipeg. During that conversation, I had a vision of buses coming to Vancouver from Manitoba flat-packed, like Ikea furniture. You can see the deliciously assembled nature of the buses if you visit other Canadian cities and recognize things like stop buzzer pulls, poles and grates from one bus system to another, as well as common elements between bus models. Viewed systemically, you could say that cities have chosen customization over the savings enabled by economies of scale by standardizing buses. Considering that on the consumer end, products are using the Internet to differentiate their products and services through mass customization (Flip’s custom-skinned MinoHD cameras are a good example of this). Buses have hundreds and thousands more things to customize about them, but with any luck, lessons learned by these product producers can be passed on to their appropriate counterparts in things like bus assembly and production. A story for another time: my outsider’s view of the TransLink’s bus rack debacle, which I think speaks to the modularity and user-testing points that Stephanie’s made. For now, let’s visualize how much fun it would be to do bus user testing.
