Yes, I got to see the character problem several times more (on bus 178 and 670) after my previous LED display post, and I also got it confirmed by friends who saw it on other buses. It hadn’t been fixed, but clearly the displays in some buses show the correct letters.

I contacted some friends I know have some connections on the bus company, and according to “BL” all systems are supposed to be fixed and should display the letters correctly… He did say that he has forwarded my question onwards so hopefully we’ll get some further updates on this soon.

I got a nice quote forwarded from BL about this and it says that this is a failed installation by the techies that installed the sign on these buses. He (the person who wrote what BL forwarded) also said that if there appears “single buses” with this failure still present he wants to know the bus number to be able to fix…

So, if you read this and get to see the dreaded ü-letter on a bus, take a note on the bus number and time (and I believe the “vagnnummer” – the unique vehicle number printed on the outside of the bus) and report it. You can just post a comment to this entry if you can’t find a better place to post it.

(BTW, the photo is taken with my w580i phone and darn is it hard to take photos in the bus. When the bus finally stops at this particular stop, the sign switches text to the end station name so I could only take photos of the sign while driving…)

This week, me and my family have rented a house in the Stockholm archipelago and I’ve been commuting back and forth to work using buses I don’t normally go with (670 and 603 to be precise).

In many of the Stockholm buses there’s a rather big LED-display situated in the ceiling in the front and often somewhere in the middle of the bus, normally displaying the route number and end station and at each stop it displays the name of it while a recorded voice reads out the name of the stop in the speaker system.

While sitting there I noticed how it would display “Pülsundsvägen” instead of “PÃ¥lsundsvägen” (that is with a German letter ü instead of the Swedish letter Ã¥) but I didn’t think much more of it then.

Another day I happened to go with a complete different bus through a different area and yet again I noticed how the display used the ü instead of Ã¥ while the recorded voice used the letter Ã¥ and I was convinced someone in the bus company must’ve bought a German system or similar and very strangely got satisfied with this very strange-looking graphical choice of letters. The fact that ü was chosen is funny, since we’re kind of used to simply use a in Sweden when Ã¥ isn’t available. I also find it funny that so few people seem to mind.

This morning on the bus when I decided to mention my recent findings to a friend, I was shocked… now this bus actually showed Ã¥ just like it should.

This makes me so puzzled. Was I only dreaming? Do they use different displays/drivers in different buses? Did they do a software upgrade exactly this week that is removing this flaw?