fairysdad
Member
Yet another question from me I'm afraid, sorry about this!
I was behind a bus yesterday and found myself musing about its LED display. As I approached the back of it, I realised that the closer I got to it, the less readable the display was - not to the extent of being unable to read it.
Something that has annoyed me with these displays for ages is that the baseline of characters is at the bottom of the display, but it means that letters with descenders are pushed up - when you only have about 5 LEDs high for the letters, there's a not a lot of choice!
Something that I ended up thinking specifically about was whether the resolution of the displays could be increased, then the displays could be more readable and possibly show more on them.
I remember being surprised at first that the New Bus for London had traditional blinds rather than screens, but realised that TfL specified this (as for all(?) their buses) for readability purposes and actually I guess that a 'paper' display would have the highest resolution of any screen!
However, there is also the flaw of having that re-rolled out across the country in that in London, buses are set for certain routes, so the number of destinations on the display are minimal whereas in the 'sticks', a bus can take on many different routes in an area (although you may get buses that stick to certain routes, such as P&R buses, and one of the uni buses near here had displays stuck to the outside of the bus as it was one bus used for a shuttle service between the halls and the campus).
Would LCD (or even 'e-paper') technology prove a better way of doing it? I realise that there is a 'but LEDs work fine' argument here, but would it be a suitable way around it? Having just typed all that, I realise that if it was, bus companies would be using it already... Ah well...
I was behind a bus yesterday and found myself musing about its LED display. As I approached the back of it, I realised that the closer I got to it, the less readable the display was - not to the extent of being unable to read it.
Something that has annoyed me with these displays for ages is that the baseline of characters is at the bottom of the display, but it means that letters with descenders are pushed up - when you only have about 5 LEDs high for the letters, there's a not a lot of choice!
Something that I ended up thinking specifically about was whether the resolution of the displays could be increased, then the displays could be more readable and possibly show more on them.
I remember being surprised at first that the New Bus for London had traditional blinds rather than screens, but realised that TfL specified this (as for all(?) their buses) for readability purposes and actually I guess that a 'paper' display would have the highest resolution of any screen!
However, there is also the flaw of having that re-rolled out across the country in that in London, buses are set for certain routes, so the number of destinations on the display are minimal whereas in the 'sticks', a bus can take on many different routes in an area (although you may get buses that stick to certain routes, such as P&R buses, and one of the uni buses near here had displays stuck to the outside of the bus as it was one bus used for a shuttle service between the halls and the campus).
Would LCD (or even 'e-paper') technology prove a better way of doing it? I realise that there is a 'but LEDs work fine' argument here, but would it be a suitable way around it? Having just typed all that, I realise that if it was, bus companies would be using it already... Ah well...
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