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2023-04-09
Musings on some of the latest improvements on local city busses.
The city transport corporation apparently has recently purchased a new bus model. It is this bus that triggered a whole line of thoughts. There are a few additions on the bus that struck me as utterly pointless; progress for the sake of progress.
Bus addition number one: USB charging ports, prominently illuminated by blue LEDs. This is an inner-city bus, no one spends more than 30 minutes on it before they've reached their destination. I'd say the actual demand for battery-life saving USB-power on that bus is next to zero. Certainly I have never seen one of these plug points in use.
Think about it — would you have a charging cable with you on your normal city trips to even use the damn thing?
The highest demand for those would probably be by schoolkids, who carry their own powerbank to begin with.
Bus addition number two is a monochrome LCD display sporting an animated arrow pointing toward the “stop please” button. It was backlit. Come on… we all know what the push buttons do, the display isn't needed.
Why then, are these two things being put there? The answer is obvious: The commerce sales machine needs to keep running. Every new model of anything needs to be better than its predecessor, why else would anyone buy an upgrade?
This is fine in itself, progress has gotten us where we are. But progress in itself shouldn't be a goal, but a tool. New models should be _better_ in order to sell them. I challenge the notion that either of these addition makes for a better bus. The bus for me is an example of “progress saturation”. The bus as a concept is mature, of course. The interior is being changed to better comfort the elderly, parents with prems, etc. Certainly, creature comforts for the driver are also improving — which is a good thing — as are safety and security measures, engine and steering mechanisms. etc.
But why not stop there and focus our efforts on very marketable aspects of fuel-efficiency, mileage, cleaner exhausts, and similar things? Certainly that is also done.
What I've called “progress saturation” before indicates features being added that serve no actual purpose.
When I teach my customers lean-agile thinking, customer-centricity is paramount. Unterstanding the customers needs is essential to building products that customers want to buy.
In a restaurant, the concept of customer-centricity is simple: The product is the food (also more indirectly: good service, atmosphere and other factors). Would the restaurant serve you food you didn't ask for, you would likely not eat it or pay for it. You would likely not recommend the restaurant to friends and maybe not return. With busses, the concept of customer-centricity is less trivial.
In the case of the bus manufacturer, the customer is not you or me, the schoolkids, or the commuters. No. The customer is the city transport corporation that buys the busses. The people on the bus are certainly one user group of the bus, but not a customer of the manufacturer (the driver being another, the service crew a third, and so on).
However the people on the bus _are_ the customers of the city transportation corporation. So which one — transport corp or manufacturer — is at fault here? Or is it us? Do we actually demand these features? Do we _seem_ to demand these features?
Working on the assumption that we do not, it would be advantageous for the bus manufacturer not to add the USB charging ports or the LCD displays for the buttons. Probably the bus would not be measurably more fuel-efficient without them but not adding them would reduce the part count, overall complexity of the system and thus streamline its manufacturing a little bit. It would allow for work hours to be spent elsewhere, and/or drive the cost down a tiny fraction.
Apply this fat-trimming exercise often enough — the one-percent rule — and you're dealing with exponential returns in efficiency-gains.
I wonder what it would take for our society and collective value-system to recognize a focussed, efficient, streamlined system as desirable and marketable.
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