06 Jan 2018, 10:51 am
#73
(06 Jan 2018, 10:00 am)Dan The iBus system is great, and the customer experience in a bus in London is completely different to any bus elsewhere fitted with Next Stop Announcements. It's a really clever system, and the equivalent systems used by operators in the North East and beyond will never be quite as sophisticated.
You're right in suggesting that, unlike the iBus system, the announcements on buses in the North East will only play recordings relevant to the route which has been selected by the driver on the destination controller. So yes, the bus will just show the stop which it should have next reached, until it reaches another stop on the route which is recognised in the programme for that service. Go North East's buses are also set to show a generic message/slide after a period of time without seeing a bus stop the system recognises.
Most services which usually terminate in Newcastle have the option of setting the destination as Gateshead as an alternative. Of course there are regular announcements which say "This is the xxx service to yyy", which would hopefully reiterate to customers that the service is not terminating in Newcastle as it usually does. As well as this, there is also a pre-recorded "transferring passengers" announcement. This plays a recording advising passengers that the bus will terminate early in order to allow the service to make up time and to change at the next bus stop and transfer to another bus, also apologising for the inconvenience. The destination shows Not in Service publicly, so should be selected immediately before reaching the point at which the bus is going to be regulated at.
How Go North East utilise the system is more or less the system at its limit, as the technology currently stands. The only other thing Go North East could do is show connections to rail stations and Airports (showing scheduled or real-time departures). It works based on having a connection to the Wi-Fi on the bus - Lothian Buses do it on their new Skylink and Airlink buses - but the computer sitting behind the scenes only has so much memory. The more you add, the slower the system will load, and the more problems the system is likely to incur. Go North East's 'bank' of programmed journeys sits at around 500 now - the first time the media is loaded, it takes around 30 minutes to load to the bus.
Ah I see. Thanks for the info Dan.
On a slightly different note have you noticed quite a lot of Angel21 drivers bound for Newcastle Eldon Sq change their destination too early for the return journey? Fairly often we haven't reached Blackett St and the bus suddenly says its heading to Durham or Chester-le-St. One of the buses I was on last week hadn't even reached Newcastle! The driver must have changed the destination as we were going over the Tyne Bridge. Any blind/partially sighted people or tourists must be left slightly panicked wondering what happened to Newcastle John Dobson St, Blackett St and Eldon Sq Bus Station!
I realise the drivers probably are thinking I'll do it now while I remember, or, so Durham/Chester-le-St is displayed for approaching the Eldon Sq bus stand, but I don't think the destination & 'This is an Angel 21 service, to [Durham/Chester.]' announcement should be heard/seen until maybe the lights on Percy St, waiting to turn right onto the bus station approach. I should probably email this suggestion to GNE actually.
