The automated stop announcements that were heard and seen on 13 Halifax Transit routes over the past month are set to roll out across the municipality’s entire fleet of buses.
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Starting Monday, the announcements designed to help hearing and visually impaired riders will be installed on all buses used across the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM).
Announcements started playing both inside and outside the bus, as well as being displayed on screens, in mid-December as part of a pilot project to test out the system and gather information on how it can be improved.
Tiffany Chase, spokesperson for HRM, told Global News they received feedback through Transit’s Twitter account, emails and communications received from area councillors. They also spoke with bus operators to get information on the effectiveness of the program.
“Of course this is their workplace on board the bus and we want to ensure that they had the opportunity to provide us with any feedback from the operator’s point of view about any adjustments that we can make to make the service work for them as well in their workplace,” Chase said.
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Chase said two main issues were brought up in feedback.
The first was an issue of stop announcements “jamming up in the queue,” resulting in announcements going out at the wrong location, which also impacted the visual screen displays that scrolls the next stop location in text.
“So perhaps it would pause almost and then a number of announcements would repeat one after another, but they wouldn’t match up to the other stop locations,” Chase explained.
She said this technical issue was solved by working with the vendor, Trapeze, to find a solution.
The other issue had to do with the volume of the announcements, with passengers finding the overall volume was too loud, especially when fewer people were on the buses. She said they worked with Trapeze to find an “optimal level” of volume for everyone, but added they also explored an opportunity to introduce an automatic volume adjustment based on the ambient noise in the buses. She said an initial adjustment to the volume has been made, but staff will be working on putting the additional system feature in place.
“We’re very pleased to roll out to improve the overall accessibility of the transit service, in particular for those people who have previously had to rely on the bus operator or other passengers to know if they’re at a bus stop to know what bus has actually pulled up,” Chase said. “If they have visual impairments the bus announcements also are on the exterior of the bus when the bus pulls up to a stop and the door opens it will tell passengers who are waiting what the bus route number and direction of travel as well.”
Automated stop announcements is the next feature of the new GPS-based system installed on buses, Chase said. The first was the Departures Line that replaced the GoTime system last year. The municipality finished installing GPS on all buses in the summer.
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According to Chase, all 360 buses in the fleet are expected to have the automated announcement system installed by Monday.
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