The NextBus is here

I can't believe that they WASTED signs on the park & rides. I've emailed folks about this, but no one seems to understand. When you use the park & ride, like I do (although i walk there), the NextBus signs are a waste. If you use that system, you know when the buses show up, which buses are your alternative if you are late, etc. Plus, it isn't like you can look at the sign and say, oh, the next bus isn't coming for 15 minutes I guess I'll walk to campus from Eubanks Rd./54/Southern Village. Your choice is, to sit and wait. Knowing how long the wait is doesn't change anything.

On the other hand, if these signs were clustered all around the downtown area, UNC, the hospital, and Eastgate/Whole Foods area then folks might look up and say "Oh, the NS is coming in one minute and it will take us down to Rosemary. Why don't we grab lunch at Qdoba instead of the cafeteria?"

It seems to me the idea is to increase ridership and having these signs at the bus stop does nothing towards that goal.

Robert, you were not alone in suggesting this... I "joked" that folks would swing into the Park-n-Ride, see that their bus was 30 mins. late and drive into town (kind of a disincentive).

Letting my concern for lost opportunities (ubiquitous Wifi) go, the inappropriate deployment of signs and the apparent lack of a formal plan to use the data gathered tracking the buses to fine tune the system, are two of my major concerns. Others are the cost of further signage, cell-phone soft spots and the anticipatable "unexpected" additional costs.

Robert,

You're being too practical. To refresh your memory, the funds for this system came from a one-time federal transportation grant. Maintenance and extension of the system will have to come through taxes or this will be nothing more than a 1 year experiment. The system is also proprietary so the town is locked into NextBus if they do want to continue. Unfortunately, the town has locked themselves into this sytem, just like they did with the "free" website 2 years ago.

I have never seen any effort to assure accountability for technology investments in Chapel Hill.

The web site is fun to just leave on and watch sometimes -- unlike what Ruby mentions in the top of this thread, the system has data on all the buses you can see on the website. I think it's great to be able to see from home what time the next bus is arriving at any stop I care about (I have 2 different routes I can walk to get to a bus).

Plus, access via cell phone should be interesting for deciding when to leave a restaurant downtown, for example. Has anyone tried that option yet?

-J

James, have you tried the GoogleMaps interface?

Link

The current NextBus links are to a Java applet. I'm exploring NextBus's GoogleMaps interface to see if I can use it instead. One problem (reported to Google and TeleAtlas in June) is that MLK Jr Blvd is still ID'd as Airport Road. (Although you have to zoom in pretty tight on the NextBus map to see that.)

You can customize which routes display on the Google map by adding them to the URL as extra "r" parameters:
http://www.nextbus.com/googleMap/googleMap.jsp?a=chapel-hill&r=A&r=CL&r=...

I'm still digging to see what else we can control from our end.