For years, I’ve been keeping an eye out for broken digital signs. It started with LED displays — the one on the T in Boston at Park Street was malfunctioning for several years. More recently, they’ve been growing in technical sophistication, which only means that they’ve also been growing in their bugginess. There’s been something about transportation signs, in particular, that seems to attract malfunction. Some combination of continuous operation and clueless operators, I suspect, causes them to be disproportionately likely to be both broken and unnoticed by the fixers-that-be.
I’ve started taking pictures of these signs in their casters-up states. Please join me in documenting the comedy of technological failure.