My interest in bus information systems stems for my use of buses for the past year (due to the lack of a car rather than any social conscience!). This has exposed me to a variety of information products – printed timetables, timetables at bus stops, on-line timetables, the real-time displays on route 8 and 9 in the centre of Bristol and last but not least, the large LED display board at the bus stop at Frenchay campus, showing departure times on various routes. The display was a useful check, and used BIG characters (a factor of importance for those who need reading glasses) even if all too often, actual bus departures varied from the displayed scheduled bus departures.
For me, a common problem was leaving my office just too late to catch a bus home. Working at a computer, it was all too easy to loose track of time. I thought a display like the LED departure board on my desktop would help. My Information Systems Development module provided a captive group of 100 ‘developers’ to help me achieve this end. In 2003-4 a basic prototype was developed using PHP and MySQL and students extended this in class The best of the student developments was used to provide the display for the monitors around the faulty. During the summer of 2004, this work was further developed to provide a more complete data model and an SMS enquiry service.
This paper sets out the results of my attempts to discover how the display board operates, where the information comes from, why the board is there at all, and how bus information systems are integrated. The story is still being written...
Bristol City Council and South Gloucestershire Council are involved in a number of European traffic-related projects. All are aimed at reducing traffic volume, improving air quality and enhancing the travel experience. The CENTAUR (Clean and Efficient New Transport Approach for Urban Rationalisation) project was mainly aimed at improvements in public transport technology, but here is one clause (in incomprehensible euro-speak but taken out of context):
integrated systems for Park & Ride (P&R) or CT modal change areas management by using innovative payment means and with real-time information transmission to users and drivers about CT services and road congestion (my emphasis)
The CENTAUR project ran from 1996 to ?? providing about 10? million ECUs to the 9 participating cities. Funds from CENTAUR were used in a number of developments in the region, including the information board at Frenchay campus, although for reasons which are detailed below, this is not a real time system. Funds were also provided directly by UWE’s Estates department for the display board
More recently, another EC funded project VIVALDI also involves
Real time systems communicate the expected arrival time of a bus service to travellers, based on the actual bus location.
Real-time information systems typically require vehicles
equipped with a
In
However the cost of equipping the whole fleet of buses (First has around 500) at £2,500 per unit is hard to justify economically.
This board contains a microprocessor, storage for the bus
schedules and a PMR set. Periodically,
new schedule data is transmitted from a server based in the Bristol City
Council offices, via a transmitter atop the Travel Inn in
Timetable data is passed between systems in a variety of formats, ranging from:
A system-specific form for data sent via PMT to the display board
The Optime application has its own export format for transmission between Optime systems
Data is sent to Travel line in the standard 'atco-cif' format coordinated by the Association of Transport Coordinating Officers ATCO .
In addition, there is an emerging XML-based standard called Transxchange under development by the Department of Transport which is intended to be used as a common interchange format for schedules.
A number of companies, include First, are involved in developing travel information systems based on wireless technology. The ACIS site contains brief notes on some of the technologies which they use. Recent developments include GSM services such as SMS (Short Message Service) and WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) to allow a user to query the bus schedules from a mobile phone.
A related transport information system is that of Route planning. These systems allow the user to plan their travel between two places. Where the planning is limited to a single provider the system involves a search of all possible routes, given the starting point and time and finishing point and time and presenting the routes back to the user. Doing this well with a fast response time for possibly hundreds of concurrent users is clearly a difficult task. It becomes more difficult as multiple providers are integrated, and multiple modes of transport (bus, train, walking) are integrated. One example of an integrated bus information service is Traveline.
The UK Government has an initiative called Transport Direct whose aim is to provide a comprehensive information and planning system for public transport.
Another key information system is a back-office system to develop the bus schedules in the first place. Information on routes, frequency of service during the day and on different types of day, expected travel times, required bus types and bus availability, etc are input to the scheduling system. Outputs include bus schedules, driver rosters, driver trip plans and feeds to related information systems such as Traveline.
Although doubtful about the value of real-time systems, First are putting resources schedule monitoring. This uses vehicle-mounted units similar to those used in real-time display to transmit bus location data to a central server which then compares actual position against schedule location to gather data about the actual performance of schedules, providing information to schedulers to help improve service reliability. The company AIM is the main supplier for this system.
My thanks to Richard Kemble of the South Gloucestershire Council, Kenneth Cope and Brendon Lacy of First Bus, Mike Wells of ACIS and John Fell of UWE.
ACIS – Company developing transport information systems
AIM – Company developing transport information systems
ATCO - for atco-cif standard
Traveline Nationwide travel information and routing service
Unit for Transport and Society, UWE Research unit in the Faculty of the Built Environment
VIVALDI Latest EC project
Wayfarer Another supplier of transport systems
Chris Wallace
Minor Revision 5 /9/2004
Links updated 22 May 2006