(17 May 2020, 1:35 pm)streetdeckfan Technologically, a basic NSA system shouldn't be that expensive, it's essentially just a GPS activated PowerPoint presentation (I know there's more to it than that, but let's be real, not that much more)
You could in theory make one with a Raspberry Pi, a GPS antenna, a monitor and speaker, and a bit of coding knowledge (I might actually give that a go one day). I'm surprised there isn't a start up company selling the whole system fairly cheap
I've always been surprised at how bad most bus technology is really. If someone really wanted too you could create a system which controls a ticket machine, NSA's and the destination display altogether and do it all via the internet and a internal database on the vehicle (incase you lose connection) which downloads when it can as a fallback. There is obviously a system there already for the ticket machine anyway.
Then you could automatically update stuff and push messages through to the NSA such as, we would like to apoligise but there is an accident at X, this bus will be delayed or please be aware that x is closed between the 5th May and 11th May and we will not be stopping at this stop by using an automated text to voice system. Another thing you could do is change the destination depending where you are to remove via points. There's lots of things which you could do realistically do to improve the experience for bus users.
For the system the easiest way I'd guess would be to use LAT and LNG points and just check which one is the closest and announce that as the next stop until you get to a certain radius say within 100m where it announces this is x. Once the distance increases from that point it will announce the next stop and repeat. If you used the internet to do it, you could do stuff like displaying connections at stops such as the stand and times for the X66 at Gateshead and also do This bus is not stopping at X, please alight here for X.
In theory if someone did a decent system it should take minutes to update but I'm guessing it's not like that at all.
