20 Oct 2015, 1:53 pm
#677
(20 Oct 2015, 10:15 am)Michael I don't work for the company but i can say now and Dan will also say it:
It might look easy but its not....
In my opinion, destinations are as difficult as the company makes them. The likes of Stagecoach have very few problems with destinations, and I think that's because they stick to a standard size across all vehicles. Behind the scenes, the destinations themselves are nifty pieces of kit which have the potential to do a lot of things. The destinations are linked to Next Stop Announcements which is an important thing to keep in mind when making destinations, as the order must be the same on both systems otherwise they'll get confused.
Go North East has more than ten different sizes of LED destination alone (across the company), and that's before you even consider the vehicles which have the older flipdot displays and the mixture of both LED and flipdot. As such, the process to make the destinations is a lot more time-consuming, and there's a lot more that can go wrong. However, the new method of profiling the destination controllers should, on paper, make things a little less complicated (as switch settings will no longer need to be changed when a bus transfers from one depot to another).
Arriva are already falling into the same trap as Go North East: their vehicles which are refurbished to "Sapphire" specification have a front display in the back opposed to a standard size rear display, but their programme seemingly does not accommodate for this size to be used in the back.
We are looking into uploading the destination programmes and Next Stop media to vehicles using Wi-Fi. To provide an example of what this could achieve - on the first day of the Rugby World Cup, the traffic resulted in all services being terminated at Central Station heading into Newcastle, rather than Eldon Square. If we had this automatic uploading of media, destinations would have been able to show "Newcastle Central Station" with the Next Stop Announcement screens also showing a notice to passengers.
