Greyhound

Background

Founded in 1914, Greyhound Lines, Inc. is the largest intercity bus transportation provider in North America. With its modern fleet of environmentally friendly buses, Greyhound connects over 3,800 destinations across the United States and Canada. An essential part of daily life for many, this large scale service provides safe, enjoyable and affordable travel to nearly 18 million passengers each year. In addition, Greyhound has interline partnerships with a number of independent bus lines across the United States. These bus companies provide complementary service to Greyhound Lines’ existing schedules and link to many of the smaller towns in Greyhound Lines’ national route system.

Challenge

As the largest intercity bus transportation service in North America, Greyhound Lines plays a vital role in keeping both the United States and Canada moving. Heavily relied on by commuters travelling for business and pleasure, it is imperative that bus arrival and departure times are clearly and accurately represented at each terminal. With modern-day advancements in an increasingly connected world, today’s travellers have become accustomed to realtime information. While public transportation terminals for buses have traditionally been neglected in terms of technological advancements, Greyhound Lines identified a need to innovate this sector to remain competitive with the passenger experience of other forms of transportation.

Solution

To design and deploy this technological evolution, Greyhound Lines selected Message Point and OnSign TV along with PPDS. Message Point, in cooperation with OnSign, developed a completely new visual schedule application for Greyhound that integrated realtime information from their mobile application with Digital Signage. They worked with Message Point to carefully study all the pain points with current passenger information including displaying additional served cities along a route and keeping passengers up to date with schedule changes. From this Message Point and OnSign developed a solution that could be tailored for terminals from 6 departures per day to 100 and maximize the content usage of the available screen area for each terminal. Text Size, Layout, and number of schedules displayed can all be tailored easily from within the OnSign web-based management console with no need to do any programming. The first round of deployments included the top 50 markets for Greyhound by passenger volume. Outdated, static bus timetables were replaced with Philips D-Line and P-Line displays in every terminal. The combination of Phillips Android Powered Displays and OnSign allowed Message Point and Greyhound to easily switch between horizontal and vertical screen layouts to fit the available space in each terminal. This was a real boon to the project since nearly every terminal in the network had a different layout. Running on top of the Phillips D-Line’s Android platform, arrival, departure, and gate information is presented in real-time using Message Point’s TransitPoint platform powered by OnSign TV. This system, for the first time in U.S. Interstate Bus Service, provides passengers with airport-grade live information for bus arrivals and departures. Greyhound can also use the screens to display service updates, critical information, passenger education materials, and even advertisements to improve their ability to connect with passengers

Benefits

Remote central updates: Greyhound Lines can seamlessly access live GPS based information for bus arrivals and departures as well as publish additional information and notices when needed from one central web based console.

Remote upgrades: OnSign TV can push new software updates in the background to each screen to ensure every display is running smoothly with the latest features and stability requirements.

Airport-grade information: Outdated static information has been replaced with live information for bus arrivals and departures.

Android: Custom content, information layouts and passenger education videos are all displayed through the Android integration system. This system seamlessly connects information from Greyhound real-time operations center with each terminal’s screens.

Future-proof: New demands from Greyhound Lines can be easily configured and deployed by Message Point and OnSign TV, enabling Greyhound to roll out additional functionality and react to changes in technology while preserving their capital investment in the system.

Custom casing: For some terminals that required displays to be installed outside, Message Point was even able to integrate Phillips P-Line 700 NIT High Brightness displays into custommade enclosures that are both weatherproof and vandal resistant.