Paperless Schedules May Be the Secret to Keeping Your Riders Happy and Safe

Filed Under AVL Systems, Best Practices, Feature Stories, Real-time Passenger Information Systems, Transit Trends, University Transit

There is an old joke that the paperless office is just as likely as they paperless bathroom. That may be true, but in the case of transit schedules and maps, paperless looks like the way to go.

Apart from the obvious benefit of saving trees, digital information can be made both easier to use and much more timely than anything committed to paper. Moreover, all generations but particularly student populations are used to searching for everything online. They expect to find what they want, including bus schedules, where they want them and when they want them.

In an excellent post on the Trilliumtransit.com blog, they referred to a research study from the National Center for Transit Research at the University of South Florida which analyzed how prospective writers–as opposed to regular riders–try to work out scheduling information from printed materials. They suggest that there is a five step approach and that most new riders get it wrong somewhere along the way. This means that they may wind up in the wrong place on the wrong bus or get to the bus stop at the wrong time five minutes after it has left.

The Trillium folks suggest:

If a transit provider’s website doesn’t offer a trip planner, the prospective rider will need to find the nearest stop to their home on a map, find scheduled service times for the stop, and, most likely, figure out where and how to transfer, by consulting maps and schedules for their destination and transfer point. The information-finding task is more complicated if it involves multiple agencies.

The real-time passenger information tools provided by NextBus provide intuitive and comprehensive solutions. For students within a university setting, this can mean accessing bus arrival and route information on their laptop, on their PDA, on digital signs around the campus or even with a simple phone call.

Perhaps the most powerful tools are the real-time mapping components that enable student writers to see exactly where the next bus is, where it is headed, and whether it’s going to stop at the precise destination the student needs to reach.

These user friendly rider information tools not only provide convenience, but also offer an important element of safety so that students know exactly when to arrive at a bus stop with the certainty that the bus will be taking them where they want to go late at night.

To read the entire Trillium blog, click here.

To get a copy of the research report, click here.

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