Hey Doc

Before the electronic age, the bus driver or the ticket taker will call out the name of the next stop to warn the passengers. The advance of the GPS technology which can pinpoint your present location on earth plays a major row for this automated ticker-tape display of bus stops announcer now installed on most the buses in Taipei. BTW, the message you see in the picture is "Do not eat or drink on the bus". The on board GPS system sends the location of the bus to a central computer system. The computer system then tells the bus which stop the bus is approaching and which is the next stop. With all this information on hand, it is very easy to organize it and put it on a website. Here is a diagram of this system. To see the example of the system in real time, click on the blue button "Real-time bus information" on the top of the page. Pick a route and click on the button. I found not all routes are active, route 285 seems to be working. You will see few flashing green and blue bus icon along the route map. That shows where each buses are. Green indicates in-bound and blue is out-bound.

Pretty cool if all works thou.