April 7, 2014 – CHK America, the best practice provider of customer information and wayfinding solutions for the U.S. public transportation industry, is debuting its new, state-of-the-art interactive touchscreen transit kiosk, ConnectPoint™, at the Santa Barbara Metropolitan Transit District’s Transit Center in California.

Kioskfront_NextBusConnectPoint™ provides versatility in delivering transit information directly to passengers. The touchscreen technology allows customers to interact with the information – whether they are seeking to find out when the next bus is departing or they would like to view their entire route to determine the best bus stop at which to disembark. The web-enabled kiosk also provides trip planning tools that include directions for transit, cars, bicycling and walking. It even allows the customer to enter their email or mobile phone number in order to receive trip planning directions directly. With its attractive design and simple yet intuitive interface, ConnectPoint™ is already engaging MTD’s 10,000+ passengers passing through the Transit Center daily, quickly becoming a popular rider resource within days of being installed. CHK America chose to debut its kiosk in Santa Barbara as a way to gain valuable, local feedback. While, Santa Barbara MTD is the first agency to make ConnectPoint™ available to its passengers, agencies from across the nation are already expressing interest.

“ConnectPoint™ is the natural next step for transit agencies who already provide passengers with information via bus stop panels, system maps and their website,” stated Rick Wood, CHK America’s President and CEO. “The kiosk demonstrates that agencies are willing to keep up with technology on behalf of their customers. In fact, for those agencies looking to provide real-time bus information, our interactive kiosk is an efficient way to deliver real-time alerts.”

The interactive kiosk can be customized to provide non-transit information as well, including weather forecasts, yelp reviews for nearby businesses, news headlines and more. With the ability to display online advertisements, ConnectPoint™ also has the ability to be a revenue-generator for transit agencies

CHK, America - Established in 1999, CHK America now provides customized information design solutions and purpose-built hardware fabrications for many of the largest multi-modal transit agencies in the United States, including WMATA in Washington DC, Chicago RTA in Illinois, and LA Metro in Los Angeles, California. The company’s, “8-Second Rule,” has set the standard for communicating complex public transit information to customers, after CHK’s research identified that customers allow only eight seconds in which to interpret travel information before becoming frustrated – resulting in customer dissatisfaction. Under the leadership of CEO Rick Wood, a recognized speaker of and the foremost authority in wayfinding strategies, CHK America now reaches over 2 billion, fully 20%, of public transportation customers in the United States.