This morning, I finally had a chance to visit the mockup of the new subway car layout where it was on display at Kennedy Station.

After all of this week’s controversy about perimeter seating (which was rejected soundly by the Commission), I found the mockup an anticlimax.  The seating on this mockup is largely the standard T1 seating complete with underseat space where all sorts of nefarious baggage might hide.  There are no perimeter seats in the mockup and the survey does not even ask people what they think of that option.

One of the inner transverse seats is boxed in underneath (oddly only under half of the seat, not all the way out), and this is done in a way guaranteed to get a negative response.  The normal way to handle this type of design is to angle the pedestal so that it is flush with the seat lip at the top, and recessed at the bottom.  This lets people pull their feet in, and for the inner transverse seat, provides “wiggle room” for feet rather than trapping them between two seat pedestals.  You can see this design in existing subway and RT cars, as well as in the photo of the Montreal car that I linked to in a previous post.

This setup is not mentioned by the questionnaire or noted by the in-car displays.  The only reason I was able to sit in the seat was that the neighbouring perimeter seat had no pedestal and I had somewhere to put my feet.  This is a good example of designing something to ensure people won’t select it if they are asked.

One other point worth noting is that the area for wheelchairs will have flip-up seats and, necessarily, there will be a vacant space under these seats when they are down.  How this squares with so-called security issues, I don’t know.

The other aspects of the mockup are mildly interesting except for the “safety announcement” panel which is intended to run informative stuff such as what to do when there’s an emergency.  This provides the capability for video ads in the subway and is a piece of technology of dubious benefit as it is presented.  Do we really need both the video screen and the scrolling text bars that will announce stations?

Finally, I have been asked several time about the absence of a “railfan window” and replied with the standard TTC line that the wall behind the operator is full of equipment.  Sometimes even I take a while to see the obvious:  the emergency exit requires passengers to pass through the operator cab to get to the exit ramp, and they can’t do that if there is a solid wall behind the operator.  There will be a door, so let’s have a window in it.

I had a number of additional design thoughts that I wrote on my survey form, but I will spare my readers from these details.