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Developing a 21st Century Public Transportation System?
Terje Mathisen asks: "Oslo has a pretty good public transportation system, consisting of local trains, subway, metro, trams, buses and ferries (to get across the fjord, and to some of the small islands). Now they want to put screens on all the central stops (about 300), showing the exact time until the next bus/tram will arrive. This will requires GPS units on the buses and trams, radio communication back to the central, some form of comms link back to each stop, and daylight readable screens. On all the remaining stops, they want to use SMS messages, so that you can use your cell phone to query the system. Do you know about similar setups anywhere else? How well do they work? How expensive was it to develop, and what costs were associated with the deployment and maintaintenance?"
well Strasbourg(France) uses something somewhat similiar....all the tram stops are outfitted with large simple electronic displays telling you how long you have to wait for the next tram.....I would assume that the relative position and speed of each carrier in a public transportation system(train.subway,tram,monorail etc.()but probably NOT buses) is known,ie. present and tracked by the communcications and control centers of the local public transportation board...ie. someone(invidiuals working together with networked computers) keeps tabs on when and where which carriers are, allowing for central override and rerouting. If such info is available to those in control this info can probably easily be passed onto some kind of local display unit-ie. the tracks and rails used in public transport carry electronic information(ie. when such is being built lines for communication and control coordination are laid at the same time...passing such info to sms should be little more than snapshotting the ongoing communications,ie. tram 7 triggered switch 89a on Rue de Mirrior [Tr7@SW89| 23:08:2002:17.45.32] and piping this into a sms server(in europe the state-or partially state-owned telecoms usually are the biggest cellphone and sms providers.....(the predomicance of the state, in a good way, as evident throughout western europe, is manifest in exhaustive, reliable, high-quality public transportation) As far as the technical details used in such systems, this will invariably differ to a great extent from one city to the next, perhaps even between the varying subsystems of the public transportation, probably with some degree of national coordination (socialistic-ie built with tax dollars and implemented through gov. contracts and or regional industrial dominance(ie.large electronic/communications firms- phillips/erricson/noikia or ....)
(before I moved to europe(for my grad studies) I had only seen passenger trains in movies....and I have been through more than half of the US......
Sydney has this kind of thing, but i don't think its GPS related...
What they do here is have little metal detectors about once a kilometer on the track, and at all station stops. they're all wired with cabling that goes along the rails into signal boxes that presumably have some telco connection to the nearest station, which each have connections to their adjacent ones.
What this does is signal to a control room somewhere where each track is. the control dude[ette] knows where all trains in his/her area are at any time. ALL public transportation systems should already have the ability to know exactly where each of their trains are at any time, to avoid collision.
Sydney stations (mostly) have electronic notice boards, displaying the time to the next train, what its stops are, and how many cars are on the train (so you can move to the appropriate place on the platform, shorter trains don't go to both ends of the platform, of course). I think the times here are put in manually by the drones, because they are way, way off once in a while, and other times have TOTALLY incorrect information. In this case they usually come on the PA system in their characteristically overly loud mumbly Australian voice saying things to the effect of "see the TV up there? bugger it! Next train goes to wwhsdkdjsidaoj asdoijasd a stopping at wlaldj alskfhw, shodija, oiweha, oasjas, then all stations to lkasd."
I wouldn't worry too hard about seeking a wireless solution, when the train people already own (or at least control) all the land that the rails rest on. Using a wired solution here is probably more reliable considering the weather up there. (isn't it rainy & cold all the time? i dunno.)
Several cities I know that have somthing like that:
- London UK: At every tubs stop and about half the bus stops there's a sign saying when the next bus/train will get there. I'm not sure how the bus one works (maybe just pulling it off a schedule, as it's never very accurate) but the train one is generally bang-on
- Montpellier FRA: Brand-spanking new LRT with fancy displays at each stop giving exact times
- Kyoto JPA: At every bus stop is an odd sign with the name of your stop and the three preceding stops. When the bus reaches any of the three stop sbefore yours, that light goes out. Maybe radion transmitters at each stop?
Cue The Sun...
All public transit in the Portland, Oregon metro area has some sort of tracking hardware installed, with several methods available for the public to view it.
Several years ago, TriMet (the main public transit service in Portland) installed GPS/radio units on every bus in the system. Originally, these units only gave information to drivers and those transit system managing folk, enabling them to know the exact location of each bus. The units are mounted next to the farebox facing the driver, and display the current time (I always set my watch from that), how early or late the bus is, and if the bus is on route. The boxes beep and alert the driver if the bus runs more than 1 minute early or 5 minutes late, or if it deviates from route. In the last year or two, they have begun to install 4-line LED displays at major bus transfer points, which indicates the time until the next few busses. A typical display might read something like "15 to Gateway TC due; 6 to Gertz Rd 6 mins; 15 to Gateway TC 8 mins; 15 to Gateway TC 4:50" (The display goes to "due" when the bus is within a block or two of the stop; any bus due to arrive more than 15 minutes from the current time has the scheduled arrival time rather than countdown displayed). This information is also available on the web for all bus lines at all stops at a page on the TriMet site. I'm not aware of telephone access to this information, though schedules are available from an automated phone system.
On the TriMet MAX light rail, the information is obtained from loops buried under the tracks. Time until next train arrival (Similar display to what was depicted above, with Red Line or Blue line and one of a few destination endpoints in place) is displayed at a few major stops. This is unfortunately not as accurate as the GPS system, and can be sometimes several minutes off. I heard one story where a bridge malfunction trapped all the Red Line trains on the wrong side of the river, yet the displays would count down to the arrival until "Red Line to Airport: Due" would come and pass and no Red Line train would come. This is obvious a serious breakdown in the system in a number of ways, and really shows that a public address system (something our city's transit lacks) is necessary. No matter how good the system, it will fail eventually. (For another example of that, read this amusing story about a conspiracy of a bus door, a mailbox, and safety mechanisms getting a bus stuck at one stop for several minutes.)
Finally, on the Portland Streetcar, a tram line overseen by the City of Portland rather than the regional TriMet organization, each streetcar has a NextBus unit onboard, which works by means of GPS. Perhaps the most comprehensive example of this sort of information available in Portland, every single streetcar stop (with the exception of perhaps two or three system which have no practical access to power and/or telecom) has a two-line LED. The display rotates between displaying: the current time, the NextBus URL, "Portland Streetcar: No Smoking on Platform", and the time until the next two streetcar arrivals (e.g. "Streetcar due in 3min & 18min"). This information is also available on the NextBus website for every stop in the system, and I believe this information is also available via WAP.
The tram system in Helsinki has had a service for ages that uses SMS to tell school-kids when their next tram is due to arrive, thus preventing them from having to stand outside in -40C temperatures.