EyeStop – Italy’s 21C bus stops
From cnet:
The EyeStop is a touch-screen bus shelter that monitors environmental conditions and real-time bus movement and also provides information and communication tools that can interact with your cell phone.
The EyeStop, which has touch sensitive e-Ink screens as well as LEDs, features a bus map plotting locations in real-time, e-mail and Web access, tools for planning a best route and getting directions, a community bulletin board, and, of course, a place for silent video advertisements. It will also use sensors to monitor and display local air quality.
Riders can choose to have their local EyeStop bus stop sync with their cell phone. The EyeStop you normally frequent, for example, could twitter you that your usual bus is running late that morning.
Intended for tourists as well as locals, the EyeStop tools will be accessible in several languages.
…
The bus shelter and bus pole versions of the EyeStop will power themselves with solar energy, but they won’t be one-size-fits-all.
Each EyeStop will be customized by a computer program that takes into account the stop’s immediate surroundings. As a result, each can be built to fit into the existing space using steel, glass, and gray stone local to Florence. The software also considers maximum sunlight exposure for the location to determine power generation needs.
via chris arkenberg
A fine idea, especially the real-time bus tracking. The question is however, how long will those things be working untill some jackass comes along and decides to smash them to bits.
I think its nice that Italy might be civilized enough to have these. In any City in the UK, these things would have a lifespan of about an evening.
Considering how poorly our bus stops and poles fair in Edmonton, Alberta these wouldn’t live very long. I bet these could stand for awhile in Seattle, WA though… they have gorgeous glass bus stops downtown with etched designs, sometimes with decorative metal work.
Most people can’t be trusted with anything as nice as these proposed bus shelters. If you build something nice, people will bust it up.
I pass a few bus enclosures on the way to work that are full of little piles of shattered safety glass less than 24 hours after the city installs the new glass.
During Calgary’s -35C cold snaps, the glass lasts a bit longer (perhaps the vandals are just staying home, or realise the value of an intact bus shelter in combating wind-chill)
Eventually, the city repair crews will give up and replace the bottom panes with diamond-pattern metal sheeting and the top ones with that “unbreakable” plastic that will be rendered opaque by thousands of scratches and bubbly, teardrop-shaped lighter-burns.
At least with these proposed designs, there isn’t anything but glass, so once they break, you can just drive a street-sweeper over the corpse and they’ll be nothing but memories.