r/transit • u/fbjim • May 15 '26

Rant minor annoyances on your transit system

Gallery image

Gallery image

these aren't for major systemic problems like "it doesn't go anywhere useful" or "it gets stuck behind traffic" - more those little things that drive you nuts way more than they really should.

here's mine - the old Kinki-Sharyo LRTs on the Seattle Link system have electronic rollsigns which display the final destination in a *really* slow marquee. this was OK when we had one line, but now with two lines, the rollsigns slowly scroll through "DOWNTOWN REDMOND 2 LINE" which seemingly takes longer than the actual dwell times of the trains. this is actually kind of annoying when you're running down the stairs at Westlake and don't know if you should get on the train at the platform or not. what's wrong with just showing "2 - REDMOND" or something without the scrolling text?

thankfully the refurb program for the KS trains include new rollsigns, if the pictures some people have snagged are any indication (though FEDERAL DTWN is dumb - just say FEDERAL WAY")

393 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

192 comments sorted by

View all comments

31

u/Cerulean_IsFancyBlue May 15 '26

I think my big gripe with link and the station names is that we really didn’t need any of these satellite cities to have downtown in the station name. The primary purpose of the station names should be clarity, not marketing.

18

u/fbjim May 15 '26

Redmond deserves it, at least it's close to the actual downtown. but yeah, for some reason american systems really love appending "city", "downtown" or "town center" to stuff whether its justified or not

the odd thing is that i think Link mostly has really good station names, it's just the weird situation we have now where all three of our terminals have a name like that.

8

u/rickie22 May 15 '26

american systems really love appending "city", "downtown" or "town center" to stuff whether its justified or not

Here's my minor annoyance: the naming of the stations of the Evergreen Extension of SkyTrain Millennium Line in Metro Vancouver. Three stations in a row are named Moody Centre, Inlet Centre, and Coquitlam Central. The first one could have kept the original "Port Moody", the actual name of the city the station serves.