Do Dublin Bus intend to use 3g services?

Aim2Please

I was thinking now that 3g phone services are beginning to enter the public consciousness. I just ordered a 3g phone from Vodafone myself! Would 3G services like Real Time Display information (RTD) for Dublin Bus stop arrival times be an option? I saw in one of the other threads, somebody asking why we don't have RTD signs at our bus stops and I think it was Victor who said that 1500 non revenue generating signs would not be given approval. However this seems to be a far cheaper alternative.

innovative thinking is the way forward! work smarter not harder! :-)

Zaph0d

Why would you need 3g? Would SMS not be enough? I believe that the signs in Dublin that show the number of free parking spaces in all carparks are SMS-driven.

Where does the 1500 come from? Is this the number of stops in dublin? Display signs would generate revenue by improving the service and attracting new customers.

The only usable buses for someone in Dublin whose time has a value are the high frequency radial routes. You know that your peak waiting time is a couple of minutes in rush hour or maybe 20mins off peak. On low frequency routes you could be waiting an hour (like solitaryman nearly missing his junior cert exams). This is due to bunching, breakdown, traffic etc etc.

Few people are willing to set off an hour early for an appointment to allow for bus problems. So you go up to the stop half an hour early and become slowly more sick in your stomach wondering whether the bus will come in time. An information display takes away the stress of waiting for an infrequent bus and lets you know when its time to give up and get a taxi or walk - or call your mam.

Victor

http://www.dublinbus.ie/home/bus_text.asp

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I don't think approval is the issue, cost may be.

I thought there was only about 1,000 stops, but I've seens stop numbers (each stop has been plotted with GPS and an ID number assigned to it, with a little metal number tag on the stop itself) exceeding 1400.

Adding real time displays means fitting a device with both power and communication. Now mobile phone technology and solar power / existing lighting power supplies (on stops with shelters) could do this. However, the devices and the control system will cost money.

Zaph0d

Victor wrote:

I don't think approval is the issue, cost may be.

Do you believe the cost would exceed the revenue benefit from increased passenger numbers?

DB has annual revenue of around 177m. So even a couple of % increase should pay for a lot of info displays.

beller b

Hmm Dublin Bus 3G????? Ah yeah you could get a video of 3 busses arriving together.. Something to watch while your standing around for an hour in the rain!!!..They cant manage to run a time table with any degree of accurecy so how the **** could they organise any sort of 3G service... Do 1 job right not 2 wrong..

Michael Collins

Aim2Please wrote:

I was thinking now that 3g phone services are beginning to enter the public consciousness. I just ordered a 3g phone from Vodafone myself! Would 3G services like Real Time Display information (RTD) for Dublin Bus stop arrival times be an option? I saw in one of the other threads, somebody asking why we don't have RTD signs at our bus stops and I think it was Victor who said that 1500 non revenue generating signs would not be given approval. However this seems to be a far cheaper alternative.

innovative thinking is the way forward! work smarter not harder! :-)

I agree entirely. Although Zaph0d is right about SMS, the service would be simple enough to be text based - besides not many people have 3G capable phones but practically everyone can receive text messages.

I don't get what is so difficult about introducing this. All it would take would be a GPS reciever on each bus, transmit the current location to a base station (around 12 symbols is enough to get your position very accurately using OS style co-ordinates. This could be updated & transmitted every minute or more - easily accurate enough for this purpose). Then Dublin Bus could have a system that texts you when your bus is X minutes away from your stop. Where you decide X based on how long it takes for you to get to the stop in question. This could even be an internet based service where you can "sign up" for different routes.

A few people have said that DB wouldn't be interested in investing capital in a non revenue generating technology. Well, apart from the obvious revenue increase due to the improvement in customer usability and satisfaction, they could charge for the text messages themselves! I'd be willing to pay 30c to avoid wating for 30 minutes and being late or worse still, to avoid waiting for no reason if the bus is a no show.

(By the way if Dublin Bus are reading this, PM me, I'm an Electronic Engineer and will glady oversee this project...for a modest fee :P)

maxheadroom

I'd imagine that some of the attraction of using 3G rather than SMS is that (AFAIK) 3G has location data built in, so the application would know where you are and where the buses are.

antoinolachtnai

Nope, there's no location data built into 3G.

Any service of this sort you could offer on 3G, you could also offer on 2.5G or 2G. (Including limited location information, from cell location and triangulation)

I have talked to the transport companies about this stuff. There are various strategic issues that make it difficult for this type of project to get anywhere.

Personally, my reckoning is that you could easily get a 5 or 6 percent increase in ridership if you had this type of system working reliably.

In practice it, would probably be more useful for operational purposes (monitoring and planning of bus performance) rather than for real time information, at least in the short-term.

If anyone is interested in more information about this type of system, let me know. I have a lot of research and development done.

John R

There is already a real time information system at selected stops on the 25/25a/26/66/67 and 78a/51/68/69 routes. This was supposed to be a pilot for a complete system but the funding was not forthcoming from central government.

A GPS system along with a WAN using the current on board digital radio equipment is being installed across the fleet as part of the new ticketing and smart card implementation.

An Internet/sms/3g passenger information system could easily be run off the system at some stage. ATM the priority is getting the hardware installed and tested and the smart card implementation which is in the hands of the RPA.

antoinolachtnai

Well, it couldn't be run 'easily'. There is a big difference between a GPS, vehicle tracking and real-time passenger information.

Victor

Hmm, how about:

(a) a small device at the bus stop with an LCD display (not a LED dot matrix) which would display the next X number of busses that will arrive at that stop.

(b) separately I should be able to send a text message request and get the same information back.

The display / text message would say: "42§ 15:05, 27 15:08, 27A 15:13, 27 15:20, 32 15:22 ....." *

Essentially just the route number and the time the bus arrives at that stop. The text message request would simply be "0953" representing bus stop 0953 (I don't know where stop 0953 is, but the user would need to know) or "0953 15:00" representing bus stop 0953 at 3pm.

Let the individual busses report their current position, speed and number of passengers (I'm not sure what else would be useful) to a central computer which predicts when the bus will get to stop 0953 and outputs this to a text message sender which informs the devices at the stops. While it wouldn't use a whole lot of bandwidth, the sheer number of text messages (updating every stop say every two minutes) would mean the system would need to get a very good rate for individual messages. Alternatively the system would inform the stops via wireless intranet / internet type setup.

* On route 42 "§" means "To or from Seamount" (other busses operate to Coast Road).

antoinolachtnai

Well, it has to do with the cost per stop of putting up a display, connecting it to the power supply and ensuring it's reasonably visible. It also has to be vandal-proof. You also have to come up with the predictions. It isn't a completely trivial thing to do. You would use GPRS rather than SMS messages between the vehicle and the server, for cost and reliability reasons.

It's quite tricky to get this type of system to work operationally. There has to be a fair amount of training and compliance with the system by the drivers. But it certainly can be done. We have the technology, as they say.

John R

antoinolachtnai wrote:

Well, it couldn't be run 'easily'. There is a big difference between a GPS, vehicle tracking and real-time passenger information.

Easily enough that it has been running on the previously mentioned routes for several years.

antoinolachtnai wrote:

Well, it has to do with the cost per stop of putting up a display, connecting it to the power supply and ensuring it's reasonably visible. It also has to be vandal-proof.

It is never going to be viable, financially or practically, for every stop. Some areas are just too bad for any freestanding infrastructure to last. Nothing is vandal proof. It ought to be possible to run the units on solar power where ground supply is not available, it works for the city parking machines.

antoinolachtnai wrote:

You would use GPRS rather than SMS messages between the vehicle and the server, for cost and reliability reasons.

The current Digital VHF radio system that DB already use is to be used for the real time ticketing system and location.

antoinolachtnai wrote:

It's quite tricky to get this type of system to work operationally.

The really tricky part is to estimate how long a bus will take from any given point to any other, with Dublin traffic I doubt to the minute timing will ever be possible on many routes.

antoinolachtnai wrote:

There has to be a fair amount of training and compliance with the system by the drivers. But it certainly can be done. We have the technology, as they say.

There should be no difficulty with this, the ticketing, smart card, destination display and location info is all to be routed through the new ticket machines. Drivers have for many years been using similar module based machines, the operation of setting the route and inputting driver and duty info into the ticket machine will automatically run the other services.