Tulsa Transit is rolling out a few new pieces of tech soon.
A driver assistance system called mobile eye will be live within the next month.
"It will be giving them a series of beeps for things like you're following too closely, you're going over into the other lane, there's a pedestrian nearby," said Tulsa Transit Assistant General Manager Debbie Ruggles. "We did some testing and found that with the presence of those beeps, our driver performance was much better."
Route buses will sound a little different in the near future. The Americans with Disabilities Act requires drivers to announce when they approach major intersections and stops. Eventually, they won’t have to.
"We are in the process of having a local developer create a project for us that those will all be automated announcements, all done on a GPS thing," Ruggles said.
The automated announcements will be in English and Spanish and will help both the visually impaired and people new to Tulsa. The automated system may also be used for marketing announcements and other information.
And starting today, Lift drivers’ paper itineraries are being replaced by mobile data terminals.
"They'll be able to be much more efficient in putting the information in, should be more accurate, and certainly much less expensive in terms of being able to download that data and not have two and three people trying to put all that information into the computer," Ruggles said.
The mobile data terminals have been in the works for a few years.
