This New System Makes Sure You Always Get a Seat on Your Commute
You know how when you’re waiting for the train, metro, subway, whatever you call it in your city, it’s always a gamble as to which car is going to have room for you to sit down… let alone have room for you to fit in the car? Should you go to the back? The front? The middle? No matter where you try to strategically place yourself, half the time, you end up scrambling to another car to try to shove yourself onto the train so you can get to work on time.
Well in the city where they know how to move people with ease (we’re talking Amsterdam), they’ve come up with a genius way to avoid car overloading. The system involves a 590-foot-long LED screen that uses colors and symbols to tell riders where they should start queueing up.
Thanks to infrared sensors in the train doors, the system can gather information about where there is room to park your behind and where there is not. If the light over a car is lit up with green, know that there’s plenty of room, orange indicates the car is half full and red means “need not apply.” The screen also lights up a white section to show you where the doors will be when the train arrives.
The design agency behind the time and stress-saving system, Edenspiekermann, also released an app version of the LED screens. But so far, riders aren’t down with the app… which really doesn’t come as a huge surprise. We mean, really. Do you want your fellow commuters walking heads down through a crowded train station, bumping into each other? We think not.
So far the system has only been used in one station in Amsterdam and has been greeted with one big complaint — that it’s not in more stations. Sounds like a winner to us, and we can’t wait until we see this thing come stateside.
What do you think of Amsterdam’s new crowd-control system? Let us know in the comments below!
(h/t Fast Company)
