County : Bus Driver Keys In on Riders’ Requests for Information

Passengers on the Orange County Transit District bus driven by Fred B. Davis between Santa Ana and Seal Beach are getting a high-tech answer to some common questions these days.

More than a dozen times a day, Davis relies on a Hewlett-Packard laptop computer to answer riders’ questions about bus schedules and transfer points along his 17-mile route. Transit officials said Davis probably is the first bus driver--among 459,000 in the United States--to use his own computer to guide riders to their destinations.

“The computer is nice and small,” Davis said. “I can clip it on the dash of the bus, and it’s closer than anything but the steering wheel.”

And it’s a simple way to deliver information.

“Instead of the lengthy process of looking up a transfer in the 350-page Orange County Transit District Bus Book, I just push a button and presto, the transfer information shows up on the lap top’s (screen) display,” he said.

A resident of Anaheim, Davis said he bought his machine for $400 about four years ago. He said his computer has memory equivalent of about 16 typed pages, not enough for the entire OCTD Bus Book but enough to accommodate the information that his riders will need.

“With this particular unit,” Davis said, “you switch it on and the (software) program prompts you for the number designation of the bus line you want information about, and the direction, such as east or west. The program responds with your arrival time, and the times for other buses that you can transfer to.”

Some passengers ask distracting questions about the laptop device, Davis said, but most simply offer comments such as, “That’s neat.” He said he was surprised by how many of his regular riders are “into computers.”

Davis said he wrote the software program himself. “It used to take me seven hours to program into the computer OCTD’s route changes, which occur about three times a year,” he said. “But since then, I’ve developed a new program that cuts the time to only two hours.”

OCTD spokeswoman Joanne Curran said the agency applauds Davis’ initiative and recognizes that his computer “speeds things up tremendously” when passengers request route information. But the district has no plans to furnish its drivers with computers because money is scarce, and the same information is already available to the public on route maps, leaflets and by calling OCTD.

Davis, 37, has been driving a bus since 1974. He said his first computer was a Commodore VIC 20, still used around his home.

Davis said: “I’ve been interested in electronics since high school, and I got into amateur radio work. Eventually every ham gets into computers.”