What About Public Transit?

If you’ve ridden in a cab in most any major U.S. city in the last few years, you’ve probably noticed that many of them have backseat LCD screens that feature advertising. It makes sense: advertisers get a captive audience and cab companies get an extra revenue source (the passenger doesn’t get much out of it, probably, but like I said, captive audience).

It strikes me that the advances coming to digital picture frame and LCD technology may bring these advertising panels to many more places. One place that seems ripe for adoption of these panels is public transportation.

Busses and subway cars are already plastered with strips of advertising near the tops of their compartments. Those ads cost advertisers money to print and take public-transit-employee time to replace. As a result, they’re frequently out of date. But, what if those spots were replaced by wireless digital frames? I can image the scenario playing out like this:

The LCDs would need to be ultra-thin, light, and flexible. That tiny, bendable OLED screen that Sony showed off about a month ago would fit the bill. Sure, that needs to get a little bigger, but size will come with time.

The busses and trains would need to be outfitted with WiFi, but that shouldn’t be so complicated. It’s not uncommon these days for limos to have WiFi onboard for passengers. Trains and busses could use the same hardware and since many cities are already investing in free, municipal wireless, the network would already be in place.

The WiFi signal would be virtually uninterrupted for busses, of course, but trains would lose their connections when they go underground. Underground wireless hubs or a robust caching plan would be the solution here, because those screens will be doing a lot more than just showing ads that are updated once a week. These screens will be showing regularly updated content that people actually want to see: weather, news headlines, sports news and scores, entertainment headlines.

To further enhance the value of these screens, location-specific information could be added. The screens could display listings for events happening in the city that day and provide maps of how to get to them on the bus or subway. They could even provide event listings for each stop on the subway when the train arrives there. These listings could be complemented with photos of the area or similar events.

None of this will succeed, of course, if taxpayers end up footing the bill for what are — let’s face it — very cool, but not very necessary, enhancements to their public transit systems.

So, not only would the transit system need to charge for ads, it could also auction off the content space. So, Boston’s MBTA, for instance, might sell the rights for news headlines to ABC and for sports scores to ESPN, while the Bay Area’s BART could have CBS news and Weather Channel forecasts.

The final thing that would need to be addressed is the stability of the panels. After all, no one is going to like looking up from a book or newspaper only to be greeted by the public transit equivalent of a Blue Screen of Death.

Get a few things straightened out, though, and not only might public transit start making more money (thus enabling its expansion and doing us all a favor), but riding it might become a little more fun when you forget your book or iPod.