Here at Vestal, we’re avid travelers. Whenever possible, we try to take the train to see more of the countryside and locals. However, we started talking a few weeks ago about how unusable train tickets really are. It seems that unless you know the language du jour, you’ve got a non-trivial task ahead of you. In addition, if you’re like us, you don’t memorize your train ticket ahead of time, so you’re inevitably running towards some far-off platform trying to look at the cryptic codex which is clutched in your hand. If you’re lucky, you get on the right platform and then make your way to the right cars and finally, your seat. Train tickets are a universal commodity, and as such, should be universally understood. Finally, they need to communicate useful information in time-critical circumstances (if you’ve sprinted the whole length of Rome’s train terminal like I have, you’ll understand that time-critical circumstances are exhausting…).

To date, we have yet to see a train ticket that meets either of these demands.
We’d like to change that.

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See Also: Train Tickets, Rethought,On the Efficiency of Trains,Operation Eden,

This entry was posted by Dave Pitman on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Design, Vestal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.