EyeStop: The MIT Designed Bus Stop

How much do you like public transport? I’ve had a car, used a motorcycle, and used a lot of public transport. If you live in the city core, using public transport is a lot easier than if you are in the suburbs. Having no car clears up a lot of hassles. Also, you’ll lose weight and walk everywhere, which is a good thing. One thing that I’d like to know whey I come to a bus stop is when exactly the next bus comes by. Sometimes, bus schedules are printed on bus stops, but other times, you just get a vague notion when the next bus will come by.

This high-tech bus stop was designed and created by MIT architects and engineers from the MIT SENSEable City Lab. From our point of view, it kind of looks like a cell phone. This cool bus stop will help passengers find out when the next bus is due, where they are, and plan routes. The whole thing is covered in touch-sensitive e-ink. The stop knows where it is, where you are and what the surroundings are.

The Eyestop lets people check your email and share community information. It serves also as a digital message board. MIT just unveiled this bus stop last week at the Genio Fiorentino festival in Florence, Italy. A formal prototype will be unveiled this fall. Just like most public transport websites, this bus stop will let you plan your route using an interactive map. One thing that I really like is that things that are happening around the Eyestop will be shown on it, that way you could visit all these different events that usually you wouldn’t know about. At a touch of a button, passengers will be told of the shortest route to their final destination or the position of all of the buses in the city. The stop will glow in different ways to signal the approach of a bus.

The minimalist design is made to blend into a city seamlessly. Each stop would have optimal sheltering and maximum sunlight exposure for power generation. I just wonder how something so fancy can resist the usual wear and tear in an urban city. What would happen if the screen was smashed? We see vandalism all over public transport and it’s rare that everything is clean, especially further away from the city center. The EyeStop was developed in the SENSEable City Laboratory by Giovanni de Niederhousern, Shaocong Zhou, Assaf Biderman and Carlo Ratti, with the collaboration of the Province of Florence and the local public transportation authority. [via Crunchgear, images via MIT]