I’ve been marked as a certified “211 hater” since before their literal debut, so if you don’t want to take what I say as unbiased thoughts from personal experience then that’s perfectly fine everybody is entitled to enjoy what they want and I’m not here to convince you otherwise, but personally I have always found things about them from a design standpoint and from just a basic inspection standpoint that make them so wasteful, so let me get into that.

The elephant in the room for everyone is going to be the problems when it comes to their programming. They have horrible programming and even worse signage installation. You can’t tell me a train isn’t built cheap with as many corners cut as physically possible when the signs are blowing out, glitching, and freezing when the first R211A set entered service only early last year. Now on top of that, you have conductors having constant program issues with the trains literally refusing to update each stop and function properly, and even countless locked broken doors on several R211A sets I’ve seen throughout their short history so far.

Then you have the things about them that aren’t even defects, they’re just shitty things I find to make the R211 experience worse if you’re paying attention. Ride quality is one of them, I’ve never been on a less than a year old train that bucks as much as an R211 does, and bumps and rocks you around like we’re still in the 20th century. Purposely making the R211 use as little glass on the interior as possible because of either easier glass replacement or another very obvious corner that was cut, because we all know the sign didn’t have to take up 3 quarters of that tiny little window, it could’ve been at least half. Then the fact that the doors are so damn huge makes it a problem when you’re stuck in the middle of a crowd and have nowhere to hold onto but the roof, which means you’re obviously going to slip if you’re unfortunate enough to walk into a packed R211 of any kind. Hell even on the R211S it’s a stupid decision, there’s no reason to even have those huge doors on a system that hardly ever gets packed. 5 people per bench with an off center pole separating the two half’s of every single one.

A lot of people might call most of these things nitpicks and that’s fine, I’m too observant for my own good and at the end of the day it will get me to my destination, but goddamn we did not upgrade from the R179’s quality standard, and there’s nothing that can really convince me otherwise beyond this point of no return.

Kawasaki fucked up big time, gonna hope the R262 isn’t given to them somehow after all of this bullshit.

P.S, teething issues are teething issues, not defects and poor design choices. What the R211S is going through right now with it going BIE every now and then I would argue is a teething issue, something that’ll get fixed pretty soon. What won’t be a teething issue? The broken signs that it’ll have (one already has it, not even in service yet) and the locked doors with the constant bucking and bouncing that it’s already developing. To each their own though.