How much needless stuff is designed into modern products? How much do we suffer when we’re trying to use software products sometimes described as “bloatware”? What was the origin of the term “bells and whistles” as an attribute of products that are overly complex?
Back in 1940, a then-new drawbridge was opened for service along the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, NY. It was called the Mill Basin Bridge.
That structure has since been replaced by a higher bridge with enough vertical clearance above the underlying waterway so that boat traffic can pass in and out unimpeded, but back then, the roadway of that 1940 bridge had to be repeatedly raised and lowered as boat traffic came and went underneath. Figure 1 is a screenshot of a roadway section in its up position.
Figure 1 A roadway section of the Mill Basin Bridge in the up position where the attendant must deploy two large steel barriers that stop traffic so that they can raise the roadway.
There was an observation tower at that bridge in which a bridge attendant would be stationed. It was his job to get that roadway raised and lowered when needed and to halt automobile traffic when the roadway was up. Part of his task was to operate two huge steel barriers that would cross the roadway in both directions when the roadway was impassable. Those barriers were multi-ton behemoths designed to ensure that no car was ever going to traverse a raised roadbed and fall into the water below.
One day, as a water vessel needed to get by, the attendant activated those huge barriers to go into position, but as he did so, he spotted a speeding motorist coming along who was not going to be able to stop in time before crashing into the barrier ahead. The attendant reversed the barrier control motors but because it looked like the barrier would not be out of the way in time, he left his post in the tower and tried to physically push that barrier by hand away from the car’s path. He did not succeed, the oncoming car crashed into the barrier and that attendant was killed.
My father was one of the emergency crew who responded to that disaster. He told me all about it the following day. Dad was the foreman of that part of the NYC Department of Bridges which serviced that bridge. There had been many other incidents of this ilk as well involving those same barriers and when they occurred, our house telephone would ring at any time of day or night and my father would have to go off to work as a result.
Years later, those steel barriers were removed and replaced with slender wooden crossing gates painted with red and white stripes. Those stripes could be seen by oncoming motorists from quite far away so no car ever went up a raised roadbed. Yes, the painted gates may have been now and then smithereened, but no repeat of the above tragedy ever took place, at least so far as I was ever told.
The overdesign aspect of all this is that those immense steel barriers were not only unnecessary, they were a danger in their own right. Putting them in was a major cost item with negative impact (no pun intended) on the drawbridge’s operating history.
Those barriers were a tragic example of overdesign.
John Dunn is an electronics consultant, and a graduate of The Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (BSEE) and of New York University (MSEE).
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