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The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and R o u n d d d

By Hamutal Dotan

20090211ttcsign.jpg
Photo by Joe Clark.

Though we’re in the midst of a very un-February-like heat wave, the smart money is on a few more weeks of snow and pain. And when that snow strikes, you may notice the return of a familiar TTC glitch: our beloved automated stop announcements will, along with the rest of us, give up the will to live. Gibberish will flash across LED screens, and the comforting, measured voice of Cheryl Bome will no longer mark the passage of streets and stops.
Astute observers will notice, however, that the dispirited LEDs are found specifically on buses. What’s with the favouritism? As explained by TTC signage sensei Joe Clark, though the next stop announcements are intended to run off GPS trackers, the system isn’t yet operational for all surface vehicles. In the meantime, the position of many buses is “calculated by counting wheel rotations (!) and relaying the data to a network of transmitters in most parts of the city.” Much snow leads to spinning wheels, and spinning wheels lead to a befuddled stop announcement system.
We were unable to get the TTC to tell us precisely when the conversion to a GPS-run system will be complete and thus cannot say how long this particular malfunction will be with us. We’re inclined to think that the frustration it causes, however, is compensated for by the adorableness of the explanation.

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Comments

  • http://null 32teeth

    1. TTC GPS is closed system
    2. you get what you pay for
    3. stop buying used

  • http://undefined Toby von Meistersinger

    That actually looks like the default/error messages typically found in LED displays of that type.

  • http://null McEVIL

    I got off at 32K RAM by accident last week and let me tell you it is NOT what I was expecting.

  • http://null rek

    Wheel rotations? Seriously?

  • http://null DanL

    Silly question but why does it have to be automated at this point?
    Can’t they just give the drivers a simple computer with all the stops listed as a ‘playlist’ and each they just ‘play’ whichever ‘track’ on the playlist corresponds to the stop at which they’re currently stopping?

  • http://null xtremesniper

    That would just give the unions another reason to ask for a pay hike. “Increased responsibilities in an already stressful work environment”.
    Automated sounds great right about now.

  • http://undefined montauk

    I always assumed that was how it worked.
    I’ve got to say, even when they’re glitchy, they’re a godsend. I have bad auditory processing – I hear it, but it doesn’t register well – and those monotonous announcements have significantly decreased my transit anxiety.
    Once I saw one get “stuck” and it kept repeating “Grandravine” over and over. If a real person had been repeating I wouldn’t have minded, but there’s something about that automated drone that really lowers your tolerance thresh-hold. The guy beside me closed his eyes and started whispering “We know, we know.”

  • http://null xtremesniper

    I’d imagine that if a real person was repeating the same stop over and over again, someone would go up to him and knock some sense back into him. You can’t smack up a computer system… Well, you could always try.

  • http://undefined Protagonist

    Those signs only have 32K of RAM? Are they running on Vic-20s? (From the geek peanut gallery: “No, because then they’d have only 5K of RAM, hya!”)

  • http://null xtremesniper

    Haha, yeah. Well they don’t really need all that much RAM just to display text I suppose.

  • http://null wilshire

    I see those glitches constantly, but my favourite glitches occur when the bus is slow-moving and the visible stop name has the opportunity to cycle through the LED sign’s default text wipes/blinks/text-explosions/etc.