When Much Is Too Much

I arrived to the Yuseong (유성) bus terminal around 2 pm last friday, a bit too early for catching the bus to Seoul, which was scheduled for 30-something minutes later. I sat on one of the few available seats, just next to an exit door, but quickly realized why it was unoccupied: for every person opening the door, cold air from outside blew right on me.

As more and more people was continuously passing through the door, with a bit of malice but also genuine curiosity, I have start counting for how many seconds the door remained closed before another person would open it. I played this mental game for the entire time I was waiting, realizing with stupor that in only one occasion the door remained closed for about 60 seconds: on average it would remain close for less than 20 seconds.

You might be thinking "so what?", but if you genuinely think about the situation - a door that remains closed on average for less than 20 seconds- you might understand that we are facing a design problem: why do we even need this door?

Acknowledging that I stayed in the station for only about 30 minutes, on a friday afternoon which is supposedly to be a reasonably crowded day (it was not, but I cannot say the terminal was empty), and that my sampling method was far being accurate or scientific, at the intuitive level we can still recognize that there is a problem. A door that is opened so often is inconvenient, requires a lot of maintenance (e.g., oiling), it is expansive by making the air-conditioning system ineffective (the room was freezing) and is potentially dangerous.

So why was it open so often? This door was not the only one in the terminal (there were other two) but people seemed to prefer it in order to acces the bus platforms. People who just wanted to go outside to get some fresh air, make a phone call, smoke a cigarette, put their stuff on the bus and get back to the terminal to access the conveniency store, buy a ticket (the ticket booth is located in the waiting room), or pass across the building would pass through this door.

Perhaps a better space layout where the ticket booth is not in the waiting room would partially solve this problem. Alternatively, here other possible solutions:

• the conveniency store could have its own entrance from the platform
• arriving and departing passengers could use different doors
• smoking could be prohibited on terminal platforms
• buses could stay at the platform just for few minutes before departing, so that people could compactly get on the bus
• in the case where preserving the temperature inside of the room would be the priority, a second room could be used as a layer between the room and the platforms. Alternatively, a revolving door would also work.

We could go on with alternative solutions (many of which introduce new problems), but the point I am trying to make in this post is simple: the door described above is a design-bottleneck, and the fact that is clearly over-used is a symptom that highlights a space-layout problem.