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Friday fun post: what type of seat material do you like best?

Friday fun post: what type of seat material do you like best?

If you like, skip to the end of this post to tell us your favourite seat material on transit.

Last week: what do you do when waiting for transit?

Last week, I asked you what you do when waiting for transit.

We had 135 votes, and possibly unsurprisingly, the most popular answer was “watch the street/track like a hawk to see if your ride is coming” with 45%.

Second most popular was “people watch” (21%) and third was using a phone or smartphone (18%). Just 7% said they read, and 7% chose “other.”

There was a diversity of answers in the comments: most people felt impatient waiting, but had different ways of handling it. Here’s Ed:

Playing games on my iPod touch is the easiest way to kill time, or else I’d be reading those free newspapers that are handed out at Canada Line stations during peak hours. Sometimes, I purposely miss the train if I have time, just to catch a breeze or soak in the good weather, a pro of Richmond stations!

Peter and Andrew thought there should have been a category for pacing (Reva did suggest one originally — sorry for pulling it out!) Here’s Peter:

I’m with Andrew on this one — you needed another category for the impatient pacers among us — it might seem like impatience on the surface, but inside, my mind is usually racing around a rich terrain of brilliant fantasy: next time I get restless — a shiny black limo with shaded windows is going to pull up to the bus stop and offer me a ride to exactly where I’m going… and there will be tray with champagne and caviar sitting there for me to enjoy — and everybody at the bus stop will be wondering “who was that.?”

And ericmk was very zen about the whole experience.

When I’m waiting for the bus/train, I usually am pretty calm, especially after work when I’m not in a rush. I don’t have to worry about driving, and worrying about the timeliness of transit is kinda useless because it won’t get you to your destination any sooner! Or at least that’s my mindset! So, I pass the time with my BlackBerry because I’m addicted to it. I’ll check my email or look at whatever else suits my fancy- like the Buzzer blog! And I’m still waiting for an app for Blackberry- developers get to work! I’m not getting an iphone anytime soon!

Also, Tsushima Masaki had a helpful hint for those with smartphones.

Actually (a side note), a little something I noticed a couple months ago is you can actually get a schedule of train times on the Translink website. For example to get actual train arrival times go to http://tripplanning.translink.bc.ca/hiwire?.a=iScheduleLookup and type in 980 as the bus route.
999 is Expo Line
998 is Seabus
997 is West Coast Express Trainbus
996 is Millennium Line

Anyway, as always, have a look at the original comment thread for more!

This week: what type of seat material do you like best?

Alisha suggested this poll, saying “I have a definite opinion on this one and am definitely disappointed when I get a vehicle with a certain type of seat.”

But before we begin, I asked my colleague in fleet management to help me out with enumerating the seat types, and he offered the following caveat:

I hope that the survey respondents would understand if we buy unpopular seats.

There are a lot of factors that go into the decision to buy a particular seat type, including appearance, comfort, purchase price, weight, ability to be cleaned, and maintenance costs. “Comfort” is usually determined by a dozen employees who’ll be asked their opinions after sitting on different demo seats.

I should also mention that my colleague had a HUGE list of seat types (there are a ton of combinations if you throw in thick/thin cushioning, metal/plastic backs etc), so I am just listing materials here.


Feel free to comment, as usual!

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