Beaten by the clock
No wonder we have so many people who feel they're being victimized
The past few weeks have had me adding yet more stamps to the dusty pages of my passport, which - up until the start of 2023 - had spent a couple of years stuffed in the back of the drawer, unused and unuseful as a result of our global brush with viral catastrophe. Since around March, however, I’ve been hopping all over East Asia, going to places that I’ve never been before.
It’s been interesting, but it’s also managed to get in the way of other commitments, hence the lack of new posts recently.
In the background I’ve been writing a set of articles that sit around the topic of urban planning, urbanisation and urban mobility - one of which I intend to dedicate to the topic of inclusivity for minority groups, and in particular, one of the minorities that I am a part of.
That article is still in the oven, browning off, but after a presentation I watched earlier this week I felt compelled to put something together quickly to get this off of my chest.
The presentation I saw included some statistics about PRMs - Passengers with Reduced Mobility (we love our acronyms in the world of aviation), the quantities of which have increased significantly in recent years. I’ve noticed this at airports. Flights from some locations I’m not going to mention, are often met by a veritable flotilla of wheelchairs at the gate on arrival, often (or so it appears) for people who I’ve observed happily wandering around the terminal pre-departure or scooting up and down the aisle during the flight.
Some of the stats in the presentation were interesting and somewhat expected - such as the numbers of people who identify as PRMs simply because they’re afraid of getting lost at their destination. The way-finding is so bad at a lot of airports that I guess that's understandable, but is it really so difficult for people to find what they need that best option is to be pushed around the airport like a two year old?
Out of the total quantity of PRMs, the study data listed 1% who were blind - a small percentage, I admit - but for this group, all the conventional way-finding in the world isn't going to help them get from kerb to gate (the correct one) without some level of assistance - which currently means sitting in a mobility aid and being paraded through the terminal - a facility that generally only exist at airports as far as I have seen.
Now, let me be clear from the outset, I am not seeking pity or even sympathy here. Through the pure misfortune of genetics I have found myself with an ability to see things that borders on the non existent. Childhood cataracts, the near barbaric treatment for them in the 1960s and the aftereffects of these - including a grand total of three retinal detachments so far - have left me with only one operational eye, pretty much no peripheral vision, no depth perception and terrible night vision. In short my eyesight is atrocious, but I'm not blind.
I rely very heavily on a keen sense of direction, good quality way-finding and ready access to a GPS equipped smartphone. It could be worse - pre-smartphones, it was.
But what my personal predicament has given me is an insight into what it must be like to have an infirmity that debilitates you, and an increased sensitivity to instances where designers have clearly made absolutely no real effort in considering the needs of people less able than themselves.
It's weird, because I hear stories every day from architects and planners who want to show off their latest example of inclusive design, speaking about the efforts they've made to bring equity and social justice to their work.
Then - as has happened twice in rapid succession - I step out into the real world and am confronted with perfect examples of design that's doesn't give a fig.
The MTR in Hong Kong is - generally speaking - great. It goes everywhere, it's frequent, it's cheap and it's fairly simple to navigate, even for people who are not indigenous. But things happen with the MTR that make you wonder what's going on under the hood, and whether there is a grown up at the wheel (or whatever the metaphorically appropriate term is for a vehicle that requires no steering).
The MTR network is indeed extensive but it's not very complex. After all, Hong Kong is basically tiny, and it's very clumpy. Go to Seoul and look at their metro map…zheesh…
I like city metro systems because they break large complicated spaces down into manageable chunks with labels I can identify and interconnections that basically cannot break (see the previous comment about not needing a steering wheel on a metro car).
The degree to which I like or dislike one metro system or another is therefore down to the way-finding and the information that help me know whether I've gone the wrong way or not, as perceived through my fairly extreme level of unsightedness.
Onboard information on trains used to be terrible. If you were lucky there would be an unintelligible announcement in a language or dialect you might not understand, somehow always timed to occur as the vehicle clattered over some points or the horn sounded - just to enhance the UX…
Mimic panels work really well in this environment. A linear representation of the line you're on with a bunch of holes drilled in it, a handful of cheap LEDs and some relays to switch them on and off as your journey progresses. Works a treat. The great thing about this type of interface is that you don't really need to be able to read the words, you just need to watch the lights and the shape, then cross reference to a printed map or a phone map in your hand. This is what we have on most of the MTR these days, and even though I travel the length and breadth of the city and barely know the names of a dozen stations, I never get lost.
I can do it in my sleep, or under the affluence of incahol…
So the great people who live up in the MTR magic castle, where important decisions are made and go-getters go-get, somebody decided that the new trains won't have those mimic panels any more.
I completely get the technical reasons why you might want to dump all those lights and relays and install a screen instead. There's a million of them, but if your passengers can’t read what’s on these screens because they don’t give the full picture of the line for context and the writing is too small, then this isn't a good idea as far as I am concerned.
It would be nice if the trend does not spread across the entire network - and to be honest, my usual journeys are so embedded in muscle memory now that I rarely look at the maps - but I am not the people who needs this feature. It’s all the other lost people in spectacles.
The other great piece of decision making from the MTR has seen the removal the the nice big 500mm diameter analogue clocks that used to hang in my local station. There were about four of them down the length of each platform, and even though I didn't really need them, I could at least see them, and know how late I was for work.
For some as-yet unfathomable reason, the powers that be decided instead that the 30mm high numerals of a digital clock in the corner of the train information display were sufficient. Those displays were there before, when the analogue clocks also hung from the ceiling, and I just have to wonder what in the name of all that's holy might have been the thought process that made someone decide that the analogue clocks just had to go. Were the big hand and the little hand so offensive to somebody’s sensitive sensibilities?
Of course, it’s not a big thing. My particular minority group - the hard of seeing - are such a small and not-so-vocal group, after all. But as I wander around the world and find myself struggling to decipher the efforts of so many urban designers and what they obviously believe are inclusive forms of way-finding, it seems so ironic (given my particular version of visual impairment) that these people are so incredibly blinkered; and that brings into focus the underlying problem.
There is plenty of evidence that demonstrates the human mind’s propensity for unavoidable unconscious bias, and I’m sure that many people who might like to overcome some of this have done the reading and the research, and perhaps even put together mechanisms to try to minimize the issue, both in their personal and professional lives. However, the problem of unconscious ignorance has not been so widely reported.
Of course, it’s a never ending whack-a-mole problem. Nobody knows everything - particularly not when some of the things you need to know about inclusivity today require that you deconstruct many of the accepted wisdoms that previously appeared undeconstructable.
When I went looking for work that’s being done on inclusivity in urban management I found a surprisingly non-inclusive set of resources. It’s as if inclusivity itself suffers from Attention Deficit Disorder, never managing to keep its eye on all of the moving targets at the same time. PICSA left me unenthused. The Human Rights Campaign’s Municipal Equality Index was equally transfixed (pardon the unintentional pun) on just a handful of newsworthy topics.
What are we doing to simply ensure that people (that’s right, people) have safe, secure, simple access to the things they need to live their best lives in our cities, in a way that does not unfairly or unnecessarily disadvantage anyone?
I know that’s an unreasonable thing to ask. I just typed it…I didn’t spend a few years burning through somebody else’s research funding to come up with a more considered statement full of caveats and provisos. I also know that there will always be people who will have disadvantages that we can’t build our way around - but for those who need special types of assistance we can at least make it possible for them to be heard and seen, and to make what steps we can to accommodate those needs as a society.
We seem to be dead-set on changing things that don’t really need to be changed while we leave in place age-old nonsense that disadvantages plenty of people even when they’re not part of a minority.
Remember that Hippocratic Oath thing? First do no harm?
How about “first put the damned clocks back”?
Securiosity is going to be taking a closer look at the ways we’re responding to urbanisation demands over the next few episodes, and unpicking the challenges we’re going to face. Sign up for a free subscription and get every update straight to your inbox.