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Networked buses roaming around the roads of Portsmouth, UK
The city of Portsmouth with its 186,000 people has devised a novel solution for its traffic problem - with a state-of-the-art communication system in place, nobody has to wait at the bus stop for the buses to come.
As the citys congested roads kept preventing the buses reach on time, citizens started relying on cars for commuting, leaving aside the public transport system for its unreliable time scheduling. For freeing the streets from so many cars, a radical overhaul of the citys transport system was necessary.
Since November, an experiment has been started to connect each bus roaming along the streets of Portsmouth by creating a mesh wireless network. All 308 buses have already been fitted with rugged Windows-run PCs and can generate information about their positions using the global positioning system (GPS) to transmit the data through the wireless mesh network.
Passengers at any of the city's 37 real-time passenger information bus shelters are told exactly how long they have to wait for the bus to arrive.
At the cost of £4.2m, the network is now saving the city councils transport budget. Migration from fixed line networks to the mesh network has helped the council in saving more than £70,000 a year in telephony charges.
Portsmouth has become one of the first places in the world to implement advanced transport telematics or intelligent transports systems successfully to overcome its transport problem.
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