St Marychurch is in the north of Torquay, up the Babbacombe Rd, and is where this bus goes. It's about 10 miles from where this bus is, which is Brixham. The journey to St Marychurch takes this bus through Paignton and Torquay which is where almost 90% of the passengers who get on in Brixham are going. But does it say that on the destination blind? Of Paignton there is no mention. That's 45% of the passengers put off traveling on this bus. Torquay gets mentioned twice, the Strand and Castle Circus but would some one who is down here for a week know that? Probably not. That's an other 45% gone. Many off them would have heard of Babbacombe because of the beach and the Modal Village and even the Cliff Railway but not the area to the north known as St Marychurch. Would you get on a bus if you didn't have a clue where it was going? OK. I know you can always ask the driver where it is going but I know from comments holiday making passengers have made to me about their home town bus drivers that asking for information is sometimes not worth the risk. Try it here and you will be plesently supprised (I hope).
Anyway I was going to put in a memo about this problem but I have noticed that some of the buses do now have destination blinds that have point out that the bus goes to Paignton and then Torquay before vanishing into the outer wilderness of St Marychurch. Hopefully all will be done soon.
8 comments:
There is one big snag with these "cycling" blind displays ... unless the ultimate destination is kept static, (and only the intermediates change), then it can be confusing to passengers halfway along a route - especially if, at the moment they glanced up, the blind was showing somewhere already passed...
I think the best displays are the two line ones where the ultimate destination is upper case on the bottom line and stays static, whilst the intermediates are lower case on the top line and scroll fairly quickly horizontally...
Best of both worlds...
Digital destination displays are problematic.
Half of the Stagecoach buses up here have broken ones. They either looks pixelated, very squashed or just nothing.
However, at xmas they do run the destinations, which then clears to show "Merry Xmas & A Happy New Year" for a few seconds, before going back to the destination. When this happens, alot of people dont even know what number bus it is!
Problem is these days all destination displays have to be in lower case lettering, for the DDA compliance etc, personally I think that there should be some sort of link to the ticket machine that when the machine is nudged forward through the variosu stages that the destination scroll would not then display points already served, maybe this is a facility already available? I dont know. Also some of it is down to the driver, how is the 12B destinations set up on the chip in the bus? The 12B has only been extended to serve Brixham this last weekend, so maybe not all vehicles have been set up to display Paignton, Torquay, St Marychurch? Anyway, does it really matter as many passengers dont bother reading the scroll anyway!!! Although I suppose on the 12B people will now start asking for Brookes now wont they!!! :-)
James
Destination Blinds which show intermediate destinations are a problem. Many times in the summer season a driver will be in Paignton bus station heading for Brixham and a passenger will board wishing to go to Torquay. Now people who use buses regularly may know how the blinds work but many of our summer passengers are not regular bus users and find it difficult to understand when we tell them we are not going to Torquay. "So why does it say Torquay on the front if you are not going there?" A good question. Maybe one day they will be linked to the ticket machine so once we leave Torquay it will no longer show on the blind. But it all costs money. At least it is better than the piece of cardboard with Brixham on one side and Marychurch on the other that served as a blind nine years ago when I started with the company.
Gotta love the windy ones! Except when they dont have half of the destinations you serve, available.
The Trapeze package contains a stop-by-stop link to something called "Dynamic Destination", which links with Real Time Information systems to change blinds as you progress along a route - quite how the bus will know where it is, and how ETMs, Blinds and Real Time Information chips will inter-act (or inter-react even) god alone knows...but I guess it's all some time ahead...
Thing with the RT systems is that if you update your RTC with new route/running board, it expects you to be somewhere else and therefore never changes - resulting in a very strange destination display, unless there was a manual - static override.
At least most destination blinds work, ours down here on the town service in Brixham (709D's) just have random pixels displayed on what I would describe as a static flip dot.
At Christmas, the 2 lined LED ones display (eg - the 12) 12 BRIXHAM Torquay...Paignton...Brixham...Season's Greetings! But where's Season's Greetings?
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