transport.106: View from the Driver's Seat transport.106.1: Motion Addict (wuwei) Sat 9 Jan 93 10:30 As one who's made his living, for over ten years now, as a "professional" driver (mostly with a small city bus system, but also in taxicabs and with a non-profit service to the elderly and handicapped), I've watched with some interest the agonizingly slow dissipation of the Ralph Kramden stereotype (Jackie Gleason's caricature of bus drivers in The Honey- mooners), as well as having gained some first-hand appreciation for the pressures that cause otherwise reasonable people to become rude or oblivious, or both. Transit bus service is a study in conflict and compromise... Most people would prefer to travel directly from where they are to where they want to go, without interruption, at just the moment that they're ready to leave, and without having to deal with extraneous factors, like weather and other passengers. Of course transit systems (at least those designed around fixed routes) don't (can't) operate that way. Traffic control systems are timed for continuously-flowing traffic. Pull over at a stop and you lose the progression of the lights. Judging by the way some of the other vehicles on the street are driven, some people must feel a duty to impede the motion of buses. Routes and schedules adapted to the needs of those with time on their hands won't satisfy those who just want to get where they're going as quickly as possible. There's a trade-off between (lack of) delay and reliability. The less delay that's built into a schedule, the less reliable the service will be. People confined to wheelchairs or unable to climb steps want lift-equipped vehicles and no hassle in making use of them. But lifts are notoriously failure-prone and even when they work it takes as long to load one person in a wheelchair as it does a whole bus-full of ambulatory people. (The same applies to parents with children, people with packages, ...) Regardless of the strictness/laxity with which the system operates, there's always someone attempting to push the envelope in both directions. And, as if all of that weren't enough, there's the matter of the internal conflict between a routine task and the need for constant attention and split-second reactions. transport.106.3: Motion Addict (wuwei) Sun 10 Jan 93 (excerpted) But having [route and schedule] information in one's head and being able to call it up in answer to a question from a passenger are two different things. There's a _cognitive_mode_shift_ that must be performed before [such questions even make sense]. On a bad day, this may take me a second or two, and then I may have to ask for the question to be repeated. On a _really_ bad day I'm occasionally unable to complete this shift, and may, under those circumstances, be experiencing something very like aphasia. Bear in mind that we're talking about relatively simple information here, though made more complex because the passenger doesn't neces- sarily know what information they're lacking, and the question they ask may not be the one they need answered. Again, this is a matter of conflict and compromise. If there is plenty of time in the schedule, not only will there be _time_ to answer questions, but the driver will be in a more relaxed mental state and more able to switch back and forth between conversation and calculating trajectories, or even do both at once. And, of course, time is money. Slack time in a schedule means attempting to do less than we might with the bus and the driver -- something which is hard to justify in times of lean budgets. transport.106.36: Motion Addict (wuwei) Fri 22 Jan 93 20:17 When I began to really become interested in computers, late in '84, I had an easy time grasping the concept of multi- tasking on the basis of personal experience. There's lot's of things going on at once for a bus driver. In addition to everything that you have to deal with when driving a car, there's: * size of the vehicle and it's performance characteristics - width (not much margin for error) - wheelbase (differential turning radii) - rear overhang (tail lash) - high center of gravity (rocking and tipping) - mass and frame rigidity (devastating in an accident) - weight on rear wheels (steering loss on ice) - high steering ratio (can't abruptly change direction) - low acceleration (need larger gaps in traffic) - very effective brakes (can throw passengers from seats) * the manner in which the vehicle is used & minutiae - running on a schedule (a second here a second there...) - frequent stops (grueling on nerves and brakes) - stopping on demand (basically interrupt processing) - variable mass and center of gravity (changes handling) - passengers without seat belts (need for smooth motion) - interior lights (parsing out windshield reflections) - rear door interlock (full stop before opening) - temperature (keeping it comfortable for passengers) * the system - the route - the schedule - connecting routes, and their schedules - radio or radio-telephone (we use commercial band radios) * passengers - collecting fares and checking passes - answering questions accurately and concisely - announcing stops (now required under the A.D.A.) - remembering and arranging transfers (in our operation) - monitoring passenger behavior - exchanging minimal pleasantries * meta - prioritization and task scheduling - monitoring one's own condition and performance Okay, I'll admit that this doesn't _all_ literally happen at once, but then neither do concurrent processes on a single- processing machine. ;-)