Bucharest_transit_blog

A translation of a blog at http://www.tase.ro/?item=ratb-jurnalul-on-line Images borrowed from this page. ---

Bucharest Transit & The Online Journal
//By Adi// on Wednesday July 13th, 2005.

For the first time today I rode Bus Route 71 [in Bucharest, Romania], which has the new TV system //The Online Journal.//

The primary prsented materials are news of general interest: finance, sports, etc, and the format is the same as any television show, it's not just text scrolling across a screen. The news are interrupted by the announcement of the next station, adjoined by little clips that present interesting points of the surrounding area (the financial admin. building, the University of Electronics, etc.)

The display also shows other intersecting bus routes, or bus detours in case of construction. There are no ads as of yet, but in all likelihood their will be if the system expands into more bus routes than this one.

The graphics and image quality are both good. The sound is transmitted through the bus audio system. The only problem I've seen is a small flicker between the news and sports, which lasts only about two hundreths of a second, but allows you to see boxes in the background which look like they're part of a linux embedded program.

So overall the t.v. system is functional, but it's also really cool. Now if only the bus actually came on time... I waited half an hour for it to come. :)