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Escalators, as compared to elevators (lifts), are sometimes given as an example of graceful degradation and failure modes. A broken escalator is still useful as a staircase; a broken lift is of no use to anyone.
Well actually, you’ve probably all seen a broken escalator that’s cordoned off, maybe accompanied by a cute sign saying the problem has been escalated to an engineer. Apparently this is for all sorts of sound reasons: a broken escalator can be dangerous, if too many heavy people climbed on it like a staircase it could start moving and bad things could happen. But let’s not let that get in the way of a nice analogy.
Real time passenger information systems rely on data being just right, but often it isn’t – like some rascals juming up and down in a lift, someone’s inputted a wrong date and it’s the weekend and the only person who can fix it is on holiday. So a really good passenger information system should be more like escalator than an elevator, so for example if the timetable’s gone missing passengers can still see where buses are on a map.
Anyway. It’s a shame that the Welsh Bus Data Service is, in some respects, too much like an elevator and not enough like an escalator.
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Sorry to say I’ve started playing SkyCards, a mobile game from the producers of Flightradar24. Maybe it’s like Pokémon but for aeroplanes, but I don’t know enough about Pokémon to know if that’s right. It’s a slightly sad way of passing time until we die, but it’s good for learning about geography too. If you live under a flight path and are often bothered by military jets – they’re noisy, which I know is nothing compared to having bombs dropped on you – being able to earn points in a silly game goes some way to making up for the annoyance.
As the proprietor of what some are calling the Flightradar24 of buses, of course I’ve wondered: what would it look like if someone made the this of buses? But I’m not going to try to find out.
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Made the Christmas Dundee cake. All traditions are invented. It just occurred to me that I forgot to include the mixed peel, but it turns out that the recipe doesn’t call for any mixed peel.