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Another one rides the bus Video

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Another one rides the bus
Created: 02/21/2008
Video description: Cisco Systems is collaborating with cities around the world to see if broadband can be exploited to cut down energy consumption and traffic. In San Francisco, the company has rigged up municipal buses with free Wi-Fi to coax commuters out of their cars. CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos grabs a transfer and checks it out.

Another one rides the bus Video Transcript

[ Music ] ^M00:00:03

>> Hi, this is Michael Kanellos of News.com and you're looking at a bus, a municipal bus. But it's the future of transportation with people moving in to cities and people worried about fossil fuel consumption, more and more of us are gonna be riding the bus and public transportation than ever before. But to make that experience palatable, Cisco Systems is working with different agencies to do things like put in Internet access. This bus for instance, you can sit on it, get your e-mail, check out routes and things like that. It's in San Francisco, but they're doing it all around the world.

>> We have about 5 touch-screens throughout the bus and I can walk between touch screens and show as many personal -- some of the services that we have are the bus location. So, every bus has a GPS transponder on it. And there are about 800 buses in the fleet and we're able to calculate bus locations as well as intersections.

>> The buses come with three or four screens. When you need to know your route, you click on the part that says Maps and you can figure out exactly where you're at. You can also dial up Police or Emergency Services or you can actually find out things about going green. You can calculate how much carbon you're using on that trip versus taking a car. In a lot of ways, Cisco's new market seems to be city.

>> Yes, our transportation is one of the areas that we are doing in all three cities. San Francisco shows the connective bus as they are pilot project. And the idea is that we develop a scale of a solution, which also can be brought to the other cities that are interested in our program.

>> They're working with San Francisco, but they're also working with Seoul on a system that will charge people to drive it to downtown. In Amsterdam, they're setting up regional work centers, so people don't have to go all the way in town to work. They can work at regional centers and not commute nearly as far. They're recently starting also pilots in Hamburg, Madrid, Lisbon and a couple of other cities. If something succeeds they take it around the world.

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