Anyone else notice this pic from the front page story? Those monitors are so poorly placed. Who thought that location and position would be a good idea? :S
They're actually brilliantly good locations, upon specific conditions:
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They are viewable thru glass stairs, to do a final look while walking up/down the stairs (viewing them through the glass stairwells).
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Helps reduce mistakes if you start walking up the wrong stairwell
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Helps reduce rushing if you think it's 30 seconds to departure, but is actually 3 minutes or train delayed.
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There are other video boards in better places too, they're simply extra bonus video boards.
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Reduce crowding at stairwell doors by forcing waiting people to go between stairwells, away from stairwell doors. Or to the other video boards in the middle of the concourse, away from commuter flows near stairwell doors.
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Transferring between GO RER train routes (which will happen a lot more with GO RER) - e.g. Mimico heading to Markham, Danforth heading to York University. You walk down the stairs, glance at video board while walking down glass stairwell, and walk up a different set of stairs to transfer train arriving within mere minutes, knowing which platform to go to next.
There are supposedly lots more video boards, all over the place, so these might simply be bonus extra locations for seated people and people going up/down the stairs. And other central videoboards elsewhere in the big concourse space to divert waiting people from blocking the doors. For this purpose, these are excellent "extra" quick-glance locations for these video boards. If they're just simply extra generous sprinklings of video boards all over the place, those are great extra video boards, as I sometimes run up the stairs so fast, and it's sometimes good to doublecheck I'm going up the correct stairs by looking at the video board through the glass.
But
if they are the
only video board locations in the concourse (dozens all between the stairs),
then I agree -- bad location. In that case, I hope they rotate one of the two poles 90 degrees. That way, people further away from the doors can see a screen. Unless they're planning to have the two screens show different content. But from what I know, this is not the case. This is a cleverly designed "spare" location for video boards to solve all the above problems, and improve passenger throughput efficiency, reduce crowding from commuter movement paths, etc.
They DID design Union to double peak passenger traffic. Believe it or not, post-revitalization, Union will have room for roughly double number of passengers during peak period. They used professional commuter/pedestrian flow modelling when they designed the Revitalization. This is just an intentional waiting-commuter efficiency optimization, keep waiting commuters from blocking walking commuters. This speeds up commuter movement through Union massively, in the era where Union also become a frequent transfer between multiple GO RER routes.
Union becomes a major massive interchange station between multiple bona-fide surface subway lines. The videoboards between stairwells (viewable through stairwell glass) is a very good efficiency optimization towards transferring between GO trains which will happen far more in the GO RER era. It now becomes practical to cross-town-commute through Union, with a quick glance of between-stairwell videoboards through stairwell glass and then scoot to a nearby stairway with clearly-highlighted platform numbers.
Five-star brilliancy .
