During a Sunday cycling tour of St. Petersburg near the Novocherkasskaya metro station, a somewhat unusual object was discovered, baptized by the city’s authorities as an “Info Point”. On closer inspection, the object was so interesting that I decided to give him a separate article on the site.







So what is it and what is it for? For details, I ask under the cat.



Anticipating comments in the style of “this is another money cut” and “it’s interesting, but how much did it really pay for it?”, I want to say that in my opinion, even if this amount is huge, let's still try to think not about it, but about the result and that this is indeed a rather interesting project that can be very useful for tourists and those people who are not well oriented in the city.

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So...

Actually, this very "Infopunkt" is a small booth, very similar to the classic telephone, inside which the terminal is located. Outwardly, this terminal is almost the same as those used to pay for all sorts of different services and are located throughout the city.







However, functionally this terminal is much more interesting.

The first

One of the touch buttons of the terminal allows you to take a very simple, but extremely useful action - to look at information about the nearest objects - medical institutions, police stations, hotels, monuments, and so on.

The second

The second possibility of the terminal is much more interesting - it knows how to create routes. It looks like this - we indicate on the map (Google Maps, by the way, where the Google logo is covered by the “Back” touch button) the start and end points, and the terminal easily shows us how we need to move in order to achieve the goal.







But this is not the most interesting! The most interesting is that the entire route can be printed absolutely free.







However, it is worth noting that this functionality in our case did not work out quite correctly - on the printed map an incorrect part is shown. Let us write this down to the fact that “the information point functional is in test mode”.

Third

The third possibility is no less interesting than the second. Information point can easily turn into a full-fledged WiFi hotspot. And as much as 40 minutes, we can download the latest series of Interns for free within the booth from our smartphone or laptop to search for interesting information on the Internet.

Conclusion

In my opinion, the emergence of this "Infopunkta" - a serious step in the development of tourism in St. Petersburg, as well as just an interesting and competent government initiative. The city has long needed a universal reference mechanism that could help people navigate easier and faster. And finally, this mechanism starts to appear.

I hope this project will be out of the testing stage and similar “Info Points” will start to appear everywhere in the city. The first steps have already been taken - in addition to Novocherkasskaya, "Infopunkt" was seen in the metro area of ​​Courage.



I apologize for the unimportant quality of the photos - except for the phone, who knows how to shoot at that moment was not found nearby.



Update: Completely out of my head, but from this booth one could still call the rescue service.