School of Continuous Improvement researchers randomised 38 suburban railway stations onto a serialised defect-notification pad and report that unauthorised notices all but vanished while the wait for a fault to be marked at all grew close to fourfold.
A stepped-wedge trial across 38 suburban railway stations, and the public notification pad the operator has issued in response
A sheet of paper taped to a dead ticket machine is not, on any network’s paperwork, a fault report. Research released today by the School of Continuous Improvement suggests it is usually the first one.
A Stepped-Wedge Trial of Restricted Out-of-Order Notices, a research poster published today, follows a metropolitan rail operator’s decision to reserve out-of-order notices to rostered staff working from a serialised pad, with unauthorised notices removed on sight. Thirty-eight suburban stations crossed over to the new arrangement in a randomised sequence across fourteen four-week steps, the sequence drawn and lodged before the first observation, with a twice-daily photographic audit of eleven asset faces per station supplying the notice census against the operator’s own telemetry.
The arrangement worked on its own terms and cost the network something else. Unauthorised notices fell from 2.8 to 0.3 per station-week and stayed there, while the median wait between a fault beginning and any notice appearing rose from 5.2 hours to 19.4. How long a marked fault then took to repair did not move.
Somebody was already doing this, unasked and uncounted. What the trial gave us was a clean look at what a network loses when that stops being allowed.
— Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard
Slop University counts the trial among the more instructive things its measurement capability has done for an ordinary piece of public infrastructure, and the work extends the School’s longer interest in the records that keep a thing running without ever being asked for. Senior Lecturer Ronja Oyelaran said the operator’s response had been “faster and more literal than anything the design anticipated”: a serialised Public Defect Notification Pad now stands at all thirty-eight station entrances, on which a passenger may lawfully declare an asset out of order once the serial, the time and a name are filled in. Notifications lodged are reported quarterly to the University’s Living Dashboard as a passenger-engagement measure.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.gav3rv.