“Where Should I Look?” BMTC’s LED Displays Are Well, Confusing

In early 2024, the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) made a slight tweak to some of their buses. The front LED display would now display the route number on the right hand side instead of the left. This model was last seen in pre-LED buses, especially in Maharashtra such as with BEST and NNMT on the rolling cloth displays. Prior to the advent of LED displays, the route display on BMTC buses was on a metal plate with the number in the centre, the origin on the left hand side and the destination on the right hand side.

The advent of LED displays brought in a standard display layout, not just across buses of the BMTC, but across the globe. World-wide, LED displays on buses generally show the route number on the left-hand side and destination or route to the right-hand side. The reason for this is that most languages are read from left to right and people tend to look at the number first since the number is an easier identifier than the destination. Interestingly, in countries that follow the right-left scripts such as Israel (Hebrew), Iran (Persian), UAE (Arabic) and Pakistan (Urdu), the order is the same. The route number is on the left hand side.

In a 2024 article titled LED Riding Hoods, Bangalore Mirror reported that this was done to make it easier to spot buses, especially when there multiple buses at a bus stop. Commuters were apparently welcoming of the move immediately as well. Several commuters suggested going to the original pre-LED format of having the origin and destination on either side with the number in the centre, which makes limited sense.

However, this layout is rather confusing. For starters, the human brain is wired to read things in a certain order. In the case of Bangalore, where bus stops sometimes have longer names, and don’t entirely fit on to the display and are scrolling, this is a bigger issue. We view the number first and then the destination. When the text gets truncated at the end of the display, we wait for the text to scroll. Now when the number is located at the end, it confuses the brain.
Further, the side and rear displays on the bus feature the conventional format of the number first and then the route. With BMTC adopting newer and more complicated bus numbers, this also eats away at the space, for example: in this reel, one can see route numbers such as HSRFDR1 and HSRFDR1A. Now, while this eats up more than half the space on the right hand side a passenger might mistake it to be part of the route itself.

A second problem is the absolute lack of uniformity. This inverted layout is only there on select buses from BMTC’s regular Bengaluru Sarige fleet (white buses, the green Suvarna fleet and the blue BS6 fleet). The Volvo fleet, the Corona fleet and the entire wet-leased electric fleet (Switch non-AC, Switch AC and Tata Marcopolo) feature the conventional display layout. This makes it very confusing for commuters while waiting for a bus stop.

Now, going back to historical layouts from the pre-LED era; I had mentioned that BEST buses in Mumbai did feature the bus number on the right hand side. However, the reason this worked was because of a physical separation of the two entities. The rolling cloth display was essentially two units – one for the route and another for the destination.

BMTC needs to figure out a way to reduce the confusion. What are your views?

Featured Image: A graphical representative of the two different LED display layouts on a BMTC bus (Srikanth Ramakrishnan/BESTpedia)