A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities describes a pole-mounted slip dispenser and the Departure Score built on it, and a bus depot has adopted the score to rank its drivers' shift bids.
A numbered slip at twelve suburban stops gives a depot a Departure Score, and the score sets the order of the shift bids
A cast-iron box on a bus-stop pole, a paper slip and a number are now the unit in which one suburban depot reads order at the kerb. The depot will rank its drivers’ shift bids by the Departure Score of their routes, lowest first, from the next timetable change, with ties broken on slip number.
The Departure Score comes from Notes on a Numbered Slip, a research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities. The poster describes a dispenser that gives each arriving passenger at twelve stops a numbered slip, and a ledger that sets the order in which slips are surrendered at the door against the order in which they were issued. Over sixteen weeks the score fell at every stop, and drivers began calling slip numbers as people boarded. A dispenser will now be fitted to every pole on the three routes, and the poster names a rear-door dispenser as the instrument’s next step.
There is a particular patience in a person holding a number, and we would like to have been worthy of it.
— Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor, Futures in Committee
Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, said the box “asks very little of anyone, and that seems to be how it was so readily received.”
The University is glad to see a measure that began at a kerb find its place in a rota. The poster is set for display across campus signage, and the full work is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.z5sg3n.