Did I miss the bus? Maybe soon I’ll know

The bus that runs near our house operates between around 7 am and 6.30 pm, Monday to Friday. It runs around once per hour, except at peak times when it runs every 30 minutes.

One of the many frustrating things about the Wellington bus system is that you never know when you’ve just missed a bus. They may run late (perhaps up to 20 minutes or so) or they may run early. You just never know.

So it’s easy to stand around at a bus stop for half an hour or more, just waiting.

In Christchurch they have a cool tracking system, and an iPod application, MetroInfo, to go with it.

What we do have in Wellington though is the Snapper card — load it up with cash, then place it against the card reader on the bus when you enter and leave. It automatically figures out how far you’ve travelled and deducts the correct fare.

Many people use the Snapper, and I guess that means that a kind of backdoor to tracking is enabled. Which perhaps led the Snapper team to tweet this today:

@dubh Cool! We have just submiited a bid to GWRC for a RealTime System – fingers crossed that we are selected

[Via : Team Snapper (TeamSnapper) on Twitter.]

Now we’re down to a one car family the bus service is even more important. Real time tracking would make a huge difference to our use of the buses. Let’s hope the Snapper team win that bid.

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Tagged as: bus, Wellington