Accessibility helps everyone
Voice stop announcements are finally introduced in the buses of Helsinki, according to Helsinki Region Transport (HSL). Hurrah! — was my first reaction. However, as I went on reading this news, my feeling of joy has quickly evaporated, and I just want to bang my head against the desk.
Don’t get me wrong: it is a great achievement for the local transit system. However, as it turned out, HSL did it primarily for visually impaired people. Of course, this group of customers is the main stakeholder of such service improvement. But what makes me upset is that HSL still has not realized that next stop announcements may be important not only for visually impaired people. HSL remained blind that their information system in the busses and on the bus stops is simply poorly designed and even brutal towards regular customers, not just the visually impaired ones: see our notes on this subject from one year ago here and here.
Perhaps this blindness towards the simple needs of the majority of the customers was the main reason why it took HSL eight years to fully implement the stop announcing system, which is already a norm in many other cities around the globe for decades. Sorry but I do not accept the technical challenge — “different types of bus models in service” — as the real reason for such a delay: the next stop announcements were common elsewhere even before the digitalisation arrived.
Well, whatever the reason, this is a good illustration of how creating a better accessibility benefits everyone. I just regret that this well-known principle was never considered by HSL and we had to wait for arriving of the next stop announcing system for such a long time.
