Sunday, June 14, 2020

Two forms of logic: PTV website vs railway safeworking

It's only just occurred to me that various parts of the public transport network operate to different forms of logic. For example railway signalling systems are designed to fail safe. That is unless they're sure that everything is fine the system will assume a fault and stop everything until it's checked out and cleared. 

Whereas in the world of passenger information a less rigorous 'no news is good news' logic is used. Thus the PTV website might say that a bus route is operating properly ('good service') even though it's a new route that doesn't start until next month. It says this because no bad news has been received. And there's apparently no checking of data output, despite it in this case being nonsensical. Here's a Twitter exchange describing these different mindsets. 



Here's a thought experiment. What would happen if you put engineers in charge of websites and website dudes in charge of train signalling? The former may well be correct but (possibly) incomprehensible while the latter might end up a trainwreck! 

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