New York Bus Speaks Up, Announces Destinations

A bus is a bus, of course, of course. And no one can talk to a bus, of course.

Unless, of course, it’s a talking bus--like the one now rolling through Manhattan.

“Hi! I’m an M15 and I’m going down Second Avenue to City Hall,” one startled pedestrian reported hearing recently as the world’s first city bus with a voice pulled up at a stop.

“Yes, we have a talking bus,” Caren Gardner of the Transit Authority confirmed.

The greeting now being used is somewhat more cryptic, said Ronald Contino, the agency’s chief for buses. “M15 down Second Avenue to City Hall” is more like it, though officials are still tinkering with the message.

One month, the voice is male. The next month it will be female. “We’ll see what gets the better response,” Gardner said. The voice is digitalized. Over its shoebox-sized amplifier, it reaches well past those within dashing distance of a bus stop.

The voice comes on whenever the front door opens, and repeats the message once before the bus pulls off.

Thus far, New Yorkers who have heard the speaking bus say it sounds clear, full and life-like. And, added one rider, it’s kinder to the ear than those shrill recorded threats to illegal parkers that former Mayor Edward I. Koch had installed in the city’s motorized street sweepers.

The average bus rider seems somewhat indifferent. Motoring her wheelchair out of the back of an M15, Ellen Pendleton, 75, said she thought the voice worked “pretty well.”

“At least people from out of town will know something,” she said as she was lowered to the street. “But people who live here, do they need it?”

The visually impaired will benefit most from the talking bus, said the Transit Authority’s Gardner.

As for others, “it’ll work best in a snowstorm, when no one can see the sign,” said one driver who has operated talking bus No. 4517, which began rolling on April Fool’s Day.

Gardner said the Transit Authority considered volume for some time before it set the decibel level, and has turned it down a notch since. The authority plans to test it for six months before it decides whether to start converting the whole fleet of 3,400 buses.

The voice manufacturer, Luminator of Plano, Tex., which makes the electronic signs used in New York’s buses, did the first talking conversion for free. Luminator sales manager Mark Gambaccini said the price now ranges between $3,000 and $5,000 per bus, “but we’re just getting started.”