As part of the EU DGXIII `TABASCO' project, Strathclyde Passenger Transport have implemented real time passenger information on the Maryhill Road corridor. The Maryhill Road corridor is a radial route converging on Glasgow City Centre from the north west of the city approximately 6.5 kilometres in length, serving areas with a strong culture of public transport usage possessing congestion problems typical of the city's radial routes. The application within TABASCO consists of two phases. The first involved installation at all bus stops along the corridor. The second phase involved the provision of an additional display panel placed off-street within the corridor. Four bus operators running a total of 16 different services along the corridor equipped their vehicles with transponders that are detected by bus stop mounted beacons. This involved 57 information display points and 383 participating vehicles. This ensures that a bus is detected within 15 minutes of joining the corridor. Evaluation of the application followed the CONVERGE guidelines for telematics applications and involved intensive face to face interviewing of both users and non users. This gave a very clear indication of the importance of information when attempting to make public transport more attractive and the effect of information on a users confidence in the bus service and ability to make transport decisions. An output from evaluation will be the assessment of the transferability to other corridors. The paper describes the planning, development of the functional specification, the technical aspects of implementation, and evaluation of the system.
Samenvatting