This links nicely into yesterday’s post about mobile phone masts, but in a slightly obtuse way.
It’s another of those stumbled-upon discoveries that forces a new understanding of one’s locality in a virtual sense as well as (at the risk of sounding like a fluffy minded vicar), in a very real sense.
I was searching for the website of a local school, but because the school had no website of its own, one of the most relevant seeming results turned out to be a bus stop in the same street, and with almost the same name as the school.
Intrigued by the idea of a bus stop with its own URL, I dug down and found an unpublicised beta version of a GPS bus tracking service.
In brief, this web based service will allow passengers to see when the next bus will turn up at the stop where they are waiting.
The picture below shows the micro site of a bus stop very near my house, whose information is updated once a minute. (Click it to enlarge.)
This very cool idea should mean: No more waiting at the bus stop for any longer than necessary.
In London, and in who knows how many other cities, it has for many years been possible to wait at a bus stop and be reassured by a scrolling dot matrix display about the imminent arrival of the next bus home.
What impressed me here, however, was the idea of seeing the bus in a web browser approaching the nearest stop, and then dashing out in the nick of time to hop on board without having to wait at the bus stop for more than a minute.
In the image above you can see what appears to be two buses mating in full view of the amazed citizens of Redhill. Look more closely at them and you will make out their route numbers.
These dinky little buses move around the route map, updated every minute.
No more waiting at bus stops in the rain! Hooray!!
BUT, and it’s a big BUT, you have to stop and wonder who this service is aimed at.
Try to visualise the average bus user, (especially here in the satellite suburbs of Surrey where people would rather give up their firstborn than their 4X4 cars, and submit to unanaesthetized root canal work than ride on a bus) and you won’t necessarily come up with the image of a hipster with a web enabled GPRS mobile phone locked into real time bus feeds.
No, you’re more likely to find that the people who most often use buses are the people who are least likely to be: 1) Aware of this real time service, and: 2) Logging into it to save themselves time.
These are also the people who have been most inconvenienced in the past few weeks by the completely unexplained removal of most of the bus shelters round here.
A lot of the morning bus users are elderly people who like to use the low cost (or free) bus fares available to them after 9 a.m. but for whom waiting in the rain at a bus stop that inexplicably no longer has a shelter nor even a place for a dot matrix arrivals display, is unremittingly unpleasant.
And if the removal of the bus shelters is just a temporary inconvenience, as hinted at here, then why choose the wettest, windiest month of the year to take them away?
The planning and implementation of these new services has been chaotic to say the least, and from the point of view of the people in the bus queue, it’s been a total cock up.
Ding Ding! Sort it out Surrey County Council!
