Scientific and Industrial Instruments
BusPas is a smart bus stop sign that tells transit riders exactly when their bus is coming, with no app required. BusPas came to SurfaceID, a Montreal product development, industrial design and mechanical engineering firm, to turn their idea into a real product. Our team developed, designed, engineered, prototyped and produced the smart bus stop sign, from the first form factor sketches to the production-ready, solar-capable unit now installed on streets in Quebec, Toronto, New Jersey and Barcelona. It gives riders real-time arrivals on a readable e-paper screen, audio announcements and night-time safety lighting, and it gives transit agencies the passenger data they need to plan better service.
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We brought Hybrid UX Research, a UX research firm, onto the project to study how riders really use bus stops, while our industrial design and mechanical engineering teams took the product from user research and form factor exploration through prototyping, field pilots and production, a full product development journey from concept to a sign that transit agencies in Canada, the United States and Europe now put in front of their riders every day.
Our smart bus stop design has been tested from Quebec winters to Mediterranean summers. It began with a prototype pilot of more than 25 displays at the STL in Laval, on two corridors that carry nearly half of STL’s riders. In 2024, Sainte-Julie and Sainte-Thérèse, working with exo, became the first municipalities in the world to install the commercial version, with 15 solar-powered stops in each city.
That same year, BusPas won the Barcelona Innova Lab Mobility challenge, leading to a 12-month pilot at about 15 TMB bus stops, and was one of 18 finalists, chosen from 150 applicants, in the Transit Tech Lab run by New York-area transit agencies. That led to a one-year NJ Transit pilot in Hoboken, Union City and Jersey City in 2026, the same year the signs went up at Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) locations ahead of the FIFA World Cup 2026. The connected bus stop work has also been backed by nearly $10 million from the Government of Quebec through Investissement Québec.
In the news: Noovo · TVA Nouvelles · TVRS · Ville de Sainte-Julie · Ajuntament de Barcelona · NJ Transit · NorthJersey.com · Mass Transit · Metro Magazine
Text-to-speech announcements read the information aloud, and a motion sensor switches on safety lighting when someone is waiting after dark. Inside, an NVIDIA edge-AI computer counts the people waiting and the riders left behind by full buses. No images or video are stored: only anonymous counts are sent to BusPas’s ORA platform, where agencies also monitor and manage every sign remotely.
The e-paper display and audio announcements make the signs ADA-compliant and help riders who are blind or have low vision, a user experience built on usability and accessibility. For transit agencies, the sign delivers data they’ve never had: NJ Transit calls its leave-behind detection, which counts customers unable to board full buses, “a crucial metric for service planning and resource allocation.” That means an agency can send another bus, or a bigger one, where riders are actually being left behind.
We explored several pole- and shelter-mounted form factors to create street furniture that fits the urban landscape yet clearly signals “bus information here,” with the stop name, route numbers and agency branding instantly readable. Working in parallel with our UX researchers from Hybrid UX Research on the interface, we kept usability, ergonomics and accessibility at the centre of every decision, down to ADA-approved fonts and text heights of 5/8 to 2 inches. You can see more of the user research and interface work in Hybrid UX’s case study.
With the optional solar panel and 440 Wh lithium-ion battery, it offers about 3 to 4 days of autonomy, or it can run on 12–18 V DC or passive PoE where grid power is available. Industrial design and engineering worked side by side, using prototypes to validate proportions, mounting and internal layout before moving to production-ready solutions. The proof came in Laval in February 2023, when the solar-powered signs stayed fully operational through −29 °C temperatures and a −41 °C wind chill.
Every specification reflects a product design challenge our product development team solved to deliver a reliable user experience in permanent outdoor use:
From smart city hardware and street furniture to consumer products, SurfaceID’s industrial design, mechanical engineering and product development team in Montreal, Canada turns complex requirements into products people find easy to use.
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