Our daily commutes are not always going as smoothly as we would like them to. Cancelled subways, delayed trains and over-capacity buses tend to ruin our ways to work or school on the regular. And that is what living and working in a big city is like. Imagine living in a smaller more rural town where the bus doesn’t come six times an hour but maybe twice. Or maybe you are a tourist who does not have mobile data at all. Then you will more often than not have to rely on what the bus stop info point says.
 

Since displays are pretty rare at lowly frequented bus stops, in most cases paper will have to do. Small town bus commuters have a really hard time when it comes to getting information on their buses’ timetables, route data and service changes. Luckily that is exactly where E Ink and Papercast Ltd come into play. Combining E Ink’s eponymous electronic inks and ePapers with Papercast’s solar-powered passenger information display technology, the two enterprises set out to test Japan’s first smart bus stop in the city of Aizuwakamatsu.
 

Electronic Paper Works like a Display but Saves Energy

So what exactly constitutes a smart bus stop? The smart bus stop is basically like any other bus stop with an information window containing paper posters. Except the posters are not made from ordinary paper but from ePaper. Using said technology, Papercast’s data platform enables the local public transport company to remotely change the information on the poster. If to you that sounds exactly like the display situation every other train station has, you are not wrong. But you are not entirely right either.
 

The fascinating thing about ePaper is that it only uses energy when updated, meaning that as long as the information stays the same it does not consume any form of power. On top of that, reading ePaper behaves just like reading conventional paper making it more easily readable in broad daylight.

“By utilizing E Ink’s ePaper display solutions, we have developed a platform that is cost-effective, low-power and easy to use,” said Rado Skender, director of Business Development at Papercast Ltd. “We anticipate that this partnership will enable widespread adoption in Japan and other countries as it improves the customer experience and encourages the use of public transportation among residents and out of town visitors.”