One of Granada’s clean and nice-looking bus stops. Photo by celikins from Flickr.

In October, I spent a few days in Granada, Spain, with my daughter, Lorna. A quick stop by the city’s Tourist Information office gave us the info we needed about the city’s bus system, the regional bus system, and the long-distance bus service. We would soon be heading to the Alpujarras region of the Sierra Nevada mountains for a couple of days hiking and then on to Madrid, so the different bus services would be key for getting around Spain.

One thing we noticed the first day we went to the Via Gran Colon in Granada’s city center was that the series of bus-stops arrayed along the street were clean, safe, and good-looking, each equipped with an electronic display indicating the arrival time of the next bus. What a brilliant move! With one look at the display, you could tell whether the bus was arriving soon or whether you had time to run a quick errand and make it back in time.

My daughter Lorna works at the Medical Center at the University of California, Los Angeles and commutes to work from her apartment in West Los Angeles by bus each day. She told me that an information system like this one would be a great addition for her local bus-stop. As a frequent bus rider too, I couldn’t agree more. After asking a local how Granada’s system worked, I learned that each bus was outfitted with a GPS system, indicating the exact location of the bus from which it was possible to predict its arrival time. Read the rest of this entry »

Share This