Every Hawaiian bus had a rack and roll bike rack on the front of it. Oahu, the island Honalulu and Waikiki are on, is all one big city, and city buses go all around the island including one circumnavigation route that takes four hours.
As shown, the bike racks carry THREE bikes at a time.
Inside the bus, there is an automated announcement system (audible and visual) that announces every stop, complete with landmarks. Consider an Ottawa bus annoucing "Kent Street... Minto Place, Minto Hotel, Constitution Square, Crowne Plaza Hotel, connection to route 12...". These annoucements were really detailed on all routes; for example, at the University, it annouced which parking lots and which departments were being served.
Either at infrequent random times or when there had been few stop requests, the annoucement system would give general messages: report unusual things to the driver, for everyone's safety ... exit from the front door, and tell the bus driver if you are taking a bike off so everything will proceed safely ... be polite and courteous to others to make everyone's trip pleasant...types of things.
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The bike racks they have are probably stainless steel, too, despite Hawaii not having a winter.
ReplyDeleteBut for the bus stop calling, can you imagine 40 minutes, twice a day, every workday, having to listen to all that chatter? I know it would drive me insane!
I rode a bus in Hamamatsu, Japan, that had a similar announcement feature (it helped that many of the stops had names that translated to things like "in front of the station," "near the department store," etc.) - AND, the bus shelters had screens on them that announced the position of the bus via GPS and how long it would take to get there. Not when it was *scheduled* to be there, but where it was and *when* it would be there. I've been longing for something similar here in Ottawa ever since.
ReplyDeleteAnd three-bike rack-and-rolls? We should be so lucky.
Charles: yes, the bike racks were stainless steel. And if used by a single bike, it was on the outermost position every time I noticed a bike ... which makes it difficult to mount a second or third bike, without having to move the first bike. It appealed to me that for $2 you could take the bus to the other side of the island and go cycling ... sort of like an octranspo bus to smith's falls.
ReplyDeleteWhile riding the buses -- and we took some longish runs of 90 minutes and an hour each, we "tuned out" the announcements when we were far from our destination and tuned in when we were closer to where we wanted to get off.
The sound was very muted at the front of the bus.
-thanks for reading, Eric