IBus (London)

The iBus is an Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) system to improve London's buses using technology installed by Siemens AG. The system tracks all of London's 8000 buses to provide passengers with audio visual announcements, improved information on bus arrivals, and to trigger priority at traffic junctions.

On 16 June 2005 it was reported that London's buses 'fail' deaf people. As a result, the iBus system was announced on 16 January 2006 and was tried on route 149 for an eight-week trial. The system was proved to be successful, and on 18 May 2006, radio presenter Emma Hignett was announced to be the 'Voice of London's Buses' after 99% in the survey said she had the right voice. iBus was launched on many routes in 2007 and continued throughout 2008 and 2009. All routes now have the system.

Upon boarding the bus, for example, route 240 serving Edgware, iBus plays the announcement "240 to Edgware" and corresponding text appears on the visual displays. As the bus approaches the stop, the on-board system will announce and display the bus stop name. Since March 2014, the space below this name shows the current time. When a passenger has requested the bus to stop, this is replaced by the message "Bus stopping".

Similarly to the London Underground, iBus has a feature that tells passengers to alight at a key stop, which is near a key place that the bus will not serve. For example, a bus arriving near the Tate Modern art gallery will say, "Lavington Street. Alight here for Tate Modern." and the following message will scroll across the dot matrix indicators.

Each bus contains a Microsoft Windows-based computer that has the details of all 19,000 bus stops in London. The system has over 30,000 announcements for 700 bus routes.

The bus driver is able to play recorded announcements such as:

The iBus system aims to provide a better fix on bus locations than the old Selective Vehicle Detection (SVD) system. iBus can locate every bus to an accuracy of about ten metres, or its distance from the nearest stop by around ten seconds. It does this using several instruments:

The essential part of the system relies on GPS satellite data that roughly determine the location of a bus down to 100 metres. Data collected from GPS is passed into a Kalman filter, and other data including velocity and temperature is calculated on the bus and transmitted every 30 seconds via GPRS. With the bus network map, this helps the Central System to make a "best guess" of the bus position and depicts the overall image derived from the data provided by all buses, even in areas with poor GPS reception. The Central System can update the countdown signs as before that now has a more accurate prediction derived from all this data. Knowing the location of the bus, controllers have the means to regulate the service more efficiently, and priority can be given to a bus at traffic lights.

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Wikipedia