[hlandau]

The first quote is simply a statement that central locking is safer. I don't think that's really disputed, but it's not the same as saying that it was the defining motivation, especially in the 1920s.

The second quote relates to the greater adoption in the 1990s. But this is far after the initial adoption by the London Underground in the 1920s, and presumably these safety issues during the period 1920-1990 weren't so great as to be a showstopper, even if a safer design is preferable. This suggests to me that there was some other, much stronger motivating factor behind the development of the technology in the 1920s on the London Underground, with safety being a trailing motivator.

The third relates to a design issue entirely orthogonal to the design of the doors.

[haswell]

> presumably these safety issues during the period 1920-1990 weren't so great as to be a showstopper, even if a safer design is preferable.

Many things are not considered "showstoppers" during the early (or even later) stages of technology despite obvious ongoing harm. For example, there were 42,000 motor vehicle fatalities in the US in 2022. Despite this being a large loss of human life, it's not deemed a "showstopper", largely because we really don't have better options and because of the freedom that these vehicles enable. Now let's assume for a moment that self driving tech is perfected, and would theoretically cut down deaths by 75%. The safer design would be preferable, but for purely practical reasons would not be widespread for probably decades to come.

> This suggests to me that there was some other, much stronger motivating factor behind the development of the technology in the 1920s on the London Underground, with safety being a trailing motivator

How does this suggest that?

> The third relates to a design issue entirely orthogonal to the design of the doors.

The third relates to the cultural context driving adoption of updated designs, and the point is that this transition can't be reduced to any single factor.

I'm really trying to understand your position here, but you seem to continue reverting to your thesis and framing everything in terms of that thesis instead of explaining why the thesis is justified.

[hlandau]

The context of this discussion is my claim that "the adoption of electric, centrally controlled doors was naturally motivated in major part by timeliness."

You're claiming that this is refuted by the Wikipedia article, but I don't see any evidence for that. To be clear, I'm open to evidence that this isn't the case, there just isn't any there, because it discusses motives for adopting centrally controlled doors in the 1990s when the technology for centrally controlled doors was already widely available. It doesn't tell us anything about the initial motives for developing the technology for centrally controlled train doors many decades earlier, just that later on an additional motive showed up which drove some additional (late) adoption.