February 11, 2022
Red Dot Digital Media, a specialty integrator in the digital signage industry, worked with BrightSign, a digital signage media player producer, to complete a corridor rebuild project for the Transit Authority of River City (TARC), a public transportation provider in Louisville, Kentucky, according to a company press release.
The project encompassed several transit components, including eight branded buses and a total of 36 stations with informatics, fiber connectivity between the corridor components, and traffic signal priority components along the corridor.
The centerpiece of the project is a network of digital kiosks located at each of TARC's 36 transit stations. With buses feeding their GPS coordinates to the network, the kiosks display bus locations in real time, with accurate stop times based on bus location, route and speed. Red Dot provided the station informatics, keeping passengers abreast of upcoming routes, departure and arrival times and locations.
"Red Dot has been the stellar partner in the corridor informatics portion of the project. They're wonderful to work with, proactive and on time," David Herde, TARC ITS Engineer, said in the release. "They provided a beautiful and functional solution that not only meets our vision and requirements, but soars above and beyond our expectations."
Red Dot designed a system with endpoints utilizing GPS dongles interfacing with BrightSign media players to supply local coordinates used by the "next bus server" application to identify the nearest bus stop.
At each of the endpoints, a BrightSign-enabled display serves information to passengers at each transit stop. By pressing a button, the BrightSign player triggers audio prompts from a text-to-speech device informing passengers on when the next bus is expected to arrive. Additionally, the kiosks display "next bus information" for the next 10 arriving buses, with the top four displaying estimated arrival times.
A portion of each kiosk includes a rotating feed of information, including a route map, a map of the local stop area with the locations of incoming buses, and a weather forecast to help alert passengers to incoming weather systems.
Red Dot Digital Media, based in Carlsbad, California, was established in 2008. BrightSign was formed in 2002 and is headquartered in Los Gatos, California.
BrightSign is the global market leader in digital signage media players, offering the most reliable, secure and sophisticated solid-state media players on the market today.