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Posted by
Gold_12th
on Sun Dec 21 15:16:13 2014
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– State Sen. Diane Savino announced Wednesday that she has secured $350,000 in funding for the city to continue installing electronic, real-time bus signage at stops in her district of Staten Island and Brooklyn.
The funding will go to 18 real-time signs in Ms. Savino's North Shore and Brooklyn neighborhoods. Each sign will be equipped with LED screens that display the number of stops until the arrival of the next bus.
Ms. Savino and the DOT's Staten Island borough commissioner, Tom Cocola, said the signs will be a huge service enhancement for commuters who don't have access to cell phone-based bus arrival updates.
"Some people are not of the digital age, particularly our seniors," said Ms. Savino at a press conference in Stapleton on Wednesday, where one of the first pilot signs had been installed. "Very few of them have smartphones; they're not downloading apps. And this real-time passenger information is going to make a big difference for them."
Ms. Savino was referring to the Metropolitan transportation Authority's (MTA) cell phone-based "Bus Time" service, which was introduced on Staten Island in 2012 to give commuters real-time bus whereabouts via text messaging.
As Cocola put it, the real-time signs will serve as a physical expansion of the MTA's "incredibly successful" service.
His department installed its first two pilot real-time signs at Staten Island bus stops about a year ago. There's the solar-powered real-time sign at the S51 and S76 stop on Bay Street and Prospect Street, in Stapleton, and a hardwired sign for the S57, S78 and S79 station at Hylan Boulevard and Reno Avenue stop, in New Dorp.
Cocola said that the DOT would take the next several months to determine which bus stops are in the most need of real-time signage. The DOT does not yet know how long it will take to install all 18 signs.
"We knew there would be an influx of people here going to the ferry for their jobs, so we figured this would be a great site for one of the pilots," said Cocola, of the S51/76 stop in Stapleton. "And the other stop along Hylan Boulevard was another heavy bus traffic area. So we thought these would be two great sites for the beginning of the program."
The DOT couldn't confirm how many of the new signs will be hardwired, or solar-powered. That will be determined by the existing infrastructure at the future sites.
Donald Burrell, of Rosebank, was waiting to catch a bus in Stapleton just before the press conference. He said he constantly uses Bus Time for real-time updates during his commutes each day.
"Like a monkey jumps from vine to vine, I jump from bus to bus...and the basic texting updates are pretty accurate," he said. "I'm not sure there are a lot of people who don't have phones, but the real-time updates are definitely helpful."
http://www.silive.com/northshore/index.ssf/2014/12/post_115.html
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