On Sat, 17 Mar 2007 21:57:10 +0000, Paul Corfield wrote:
On Sat, 17 Mar 2007 11:44:51 +0000, Marc Brett
wrote:
Interesting news from Vancouver, BC, given that Siemens is also responsible for
supplying the infrastructure for London's iBus system.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-col.../bc-signs.html
Vancouver bus info signs 'duds'
TransLink admits the electronic information signs at stops along a major bus
route between downtown Vancouver and Richmond don't work, can't be fixed and
could soon be gone.
Is it the same system as London's? I understand Siemens have a fully
working GPS based bus info system in Cologne - there may be others.
Is there any further explanation as to why the Vancouver installation is
irretrievably broken?
Another slant on the story here. It's only the signs which are malfunctioning;
the rest of the system seems fine.
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http://www.vancourier.com/issues07/0...033107nn3.html
But the transmitters communicating the locations of buses to the digital signs
hasn't worked well. The communications system was purchased from Siemens, a
major German technology company.
"One of the issues that we've had is that the receivers have a hard time picking
up signals from the buses," Snider said. "There's a lot of radio frequency
interference out there and Siemens tried everything from hardware, software,
firmware-which, I gather is somewhere in between-and after a period of time they
basically abandoned it. They said we can't fix this thing."
Coast Mountain Bus Company, which runs day-to-day operations, relies on bus
drivers, passengers and transit supervisors to report when one of the
approximately 40 digital signs isn't working so staff can reboot it.
"That is one of the weaknesses in the system, that it's not two-way. It won't
tell us automatically when it's not working properly," Snider said.
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From the report, it looks like a transmit-only dedicated radio system supplied
by Siemens. Are the buses actually sending the signals?!?!
In contrast, the TfL web site diagram of iBus indicates that the Countdown
displays will communicate with the Central System via GPRS or ISDN.
Best quote from the article, though, must be this:
"We're quite convinced that the new system will work. Not just work better, but
work," Snider said.