A Broken window improved the Mumbai Metro ride experience, read to find how.

August 13, 2022

A Broken window improved the Mumbai Metro ride experience, read to find how.

Most of the infrastructure services are like 24X7 running factories which citizens use on the go, this leaves these services at mercy of these citizens on ‘How it is used’, ‘What kind of experience services can deliver’

Over the years these services has tried many authoritarian ways to make people behaviors in certain desired manner with limited success.

Legacy issues that Mumbai Locals have faced over a period of time

Deaths on tracks.
Vandalization of the assets & Inconvenience to fellow passengers.
Littering & Spitting within the asset leading to a bad experience and valuation for the asset.

The solution to these issues lie in a Broken Window

That’s when Philip Zimbardo’s Broken Window Experiment came into play. It postulated that visible indicators of disorder, such as vandalism, loitering and broken windows, encouraged more of the same.

Two cars without License plate and open hoods were placed in two different localities

Car 1 was placed in Poor, Crime ridden section of NY city

Vandalized within 10mins. Windows smashed, parts stolen etc

Car 2 was placed in affluent Palo Alto, California.

Untouched for one day.

Day 2: Philip Zimbardo took a sledgehammer and smashed the windows of the car.

Within half a day the car

“Key take away from Broken Window theory’“

We used these learnings to make the necessary design interventions.

Some media coverages

Nudge Theory another helping hand to fine tune our Metro model

Nudge is an approach to understanding and changing people’s behavior/behaviour, by analysing, improving, designing, and offering free choices for people, so that their decisions are more likely to produce helpful outcomes for those people and society generally

Real life case study of using nudge to shape citizen interaction with infrastructure.

Road traffic injury is one the leading causes of death worldwide. A key reason why road accidents occur is speeding: many fatal crashes could be prevented if people just complied with speed limits.
Once car drivers are in a rush to get home quickly, are upset from work, or just enjoy a thrilling ride, speed limits and even sanctions seem to be less important. Drivers are in a mental state in which they underestimate the risks of their own behaviours, an effect called the “hot-cold empathy gap”. They do not fully grasp how much their current priorities are influenced by their “hot state” and value arriving 5 minutes earlier much higher than they would normally do. How can we empower drivers to better judge pertaining risks and persuade them to voluntarily slow down?

Some authorities have started to install warning signs next to highways. Saliently placed to attract the drivers’ attention, they use emotionally loaded prompts to kick back drivers to their “cold” states.

Other entities have started to experiment with nudges using optical illusions. A prominent example is to paint horizontal lines on highways asphalts which get progressively narrower. These lines amplify the feeling of speeding among drivers and create a moment of surprise in the driver’s routine. Drivers perceive the situation as if they are accelerating and intuitively respond by slowing down

Have you ever driven an old, worn out car on the highway? Then you will probably have experienced some discomfort whenever you passed over coarse asphalt coatings. The same effect can be replicated on purpose by using a noise nudge. Different coating strips on the asphalt can considerably increase the interior noise levels at a certain speed without depreciating vehicle components. As people dislike noise, they are nudged to slow down to feel more comfortable.

Early implementers like Chicago and Seattle have been happy with the results and are planning to explore the strategy further.