This is great.
For less than the cost of a single bus, however, Metro might be the first transit agency in the country to take a significant step across an entire bus system that could open riding options to scores of vision-impaired customers with the use of a smartphone.
The secret is a small beacon about the size of a garage door opener, placed atop every one of those bus-stop poles.
“It is amazing when you see a need you can address it with new technologies,” said Lex Frieden, a member of the transit agency’s board and a nationally acclaimed disability-access advocate.
Users can plot their location using a mapping program, then the beacons are integrated into the directions. Often, the biggest challenge for some users is finding precisely where a bus stop is located at an intersection, or in the middle of a long block.
“It is about getting that information and getting it in your hands,” said Randy Frazier, Metro’s chief technology officer.
As someone approaches their intended stop, their phone receives signals from the beacon, which can send an alert to their phone. Alerts can be delivered either as audio instructions, such as how a mapping program gives drivers voice instructions to turn left or right, or as tactile directions that use pulsing so someone can understand the instructions via sense of touch. As they draw closer to the stop, the pulses increase until the rider knows they are in the correct spot.
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The beacons are a relatively inexpensive leap that could put Metro at the forefront of making transit more accessible for many potential riders. In addition to an aging population of Baby Boomers, many of whom will need transit in the future as they lose the ability to drive, Metro and other transit agencies struggle to lessen para-transit costs.
MetroLift, which offers door-to-door service for elderly and disabled passengers, costs Metro $2.47 per mile, according to 2016 data. Providing a taxi, where applicable, reduces the cost to $1.26 per mile a passenger is carried.
Conventional transit, meanwhile, costs Metro less, about $1.11 per mile for a bus and $1.17 for light rail. When that’s considered across nearly 590 million miles of transit travel in the Houston area, shifting some of the riders to buses and trains could save millions of dollars and give elderly and disabled riders more freedom to travel without prearranged plans.
Installing a beacon at all of Metro’s roughly 9,000 bus stops is expected to cost $375,000, meaning for less than the cost of a single bus every place that a bus stops will be accessible to the visually impaired and others.
Better service for more people at a lower cost. Gotta love that. I don’t have a point to make here, I just want to make sure you keep this in mind when you hear all the blather from the usual blowhards when Metro rolls out its comprehensive transit plan later this year.
The usual blowhards? METRO has a lot of problems, and doesn’t listen to riders. The blowhards need to blow harder. The CEO, Mr. Lambert, is very nice, but was formerly their chief of police, and they listen to board member Christof Spieler, who is an elite, and, let’s just say not the typical METRO rider. Now, I am all for helping the visually impaired to ride public transit, and, perhaps they won’t be able to participate in the “see something say something campaign,” which is evocative of the early history of the continent when colonists were encouraged to take up arms against the natives, and later, when citizens anyone could apprehend and turn in a runaway slave, this campaign is a coded message to call the police when someone who “stands out” is in the area, for example, waiting at Starbucks. The see something say something also reminds me of grade school, when our teachers would tell us about the Soviet Union, where you never knew if someone would turn you in. Kids there even turned in their parents. Or so they told us at school.