Bus stop display stuff

[whole diary]

[Mark A]

When you're unfamiliar with the place and checking the departures from stops in Bristol's centre - and rather than sticking to bus stop information, the display goes off-piste and as well as service information, slings driver recruitment advertisement and also birthday present stuff, keeping those on screen for long enough to read the entire contents twice. They just can't help themselves, can they?

Mark

[infoman]

Totally agree,another comment on the railway display boards.

If your at one of those train station that has  LED display boards that shows an arrivals board,the refreshes to a departure board.
The arrivals board seems to have more "time" than the departure board.
Most of us that are actually on the station are lookng for your next train.

If you have a display board 1 of 1/2/3 at the station(Birmingham New street?)
why does page one of three have less time than 3 of 3 pages?

[Mark A]

Weca are in receipt of a quick email from me about this, now awaiting a response.

Mark

[Mark A]

Ah, from Weca, a quick reply:

"Thank you for your feedback. I will pass it onto the team responsible to consider for their future planning."

Mark

[Kempis]

I agree, Mark. I often find myself staring at the display, waiting for it to cycle through the ads, until it shows the next bus.

[Mark A]

Ah, a further response. I'll respond that the info screens are still better if the practice is to display... bus running information but this will be an improvement. It still means that if the system slings two promotional screens one after the other, it's taken the information out for 15 seconds which is half way to the average time that someone will, say, abandon waiting for a web page to load.

Also, the screens don't display a countdown to a refresh. (Something that the Stagecoach bus app does and it's really helpful)

Mark

Thank you for reporting this to us and we're very sorry to hear about your experience.

It is our standard to allow any promotional material to stay visible for only 7 seconds, prioritising live predictions by leaving them visible for 30 seconds. These timings are meant to loop in this manner throughout the day, but on closer inspection we found the timings had been incorrectly setup for these particular promotions.

This issue has now been resolved and promotional images should now show only for 7 seconds again. We apologise for the inconvenience the issue has caused.

[Ralph Ayres]

Similarly unhelpful is a bus heading towards you, in those crucial few seconds when you're trying to work out if it's the bus you need before it goes sailing past, but it's displaying a message on its front blind about the latest national celebration or other event rather than its route number and destination.  The next one is likely to be Remembrance Day, but some companies may first sink as far as wishing us a Happy Hallowe'en and others will insist on using it all year round as a marketing tool for their latest bright idea.

[infoman]

not to move away from orgional topic,so hope you all don't mind.

Watching hard talk on BBC1 the guest get a FIFTEEN second display of their name,which comes up a couple of times during the interview.

Yet watching BBC^» (British Broadcasting Corporation - home page) interviews on Breakfast,the person being interviewed gets a maximum of SIX seconds of their name displayed.

Okay, back to rail discussion.

[grahame]

Hard Talk is fascinating and it's often an interview with a person who is not a household name, nor a local one, and often with an organisation that's not a household name either.  The interviews are lengthened a long way beyond the soundbite size and I for one am grateful for there remaining on screen long enough and being shown often enough if I've arrived through channel hopping.   If I see a bus approaching, I want to know where it's going in those few seconds and that's not the time to be shown adverts for a £2 fare even for a few seconds.  If screen space allows, "via" makes sense.

[Mark A]

Yup, TV captions can be related to the programming (but often aren't). If a bus stop display is going to sling a random promotion or two from time to time, sods law dictates that it'll do so at the moment someone's looking for immediate information on the buses.

Mark

[Mark A]

Aaannd... when one operator leads with bad practice, the entire industry follows. Bus stop passenger information in Bath now carrying recruitment ads for First. Given that the stop in question handles the services for several other bus companies too, if I was them I'd be annoyed. Or perhaps the passenger will eventually be treated to a series of pitches from every operator in the South West.

Mark

[CyclingSid]

Like the side of Thames Valley Police vehicles.