We’ve long dreamed of being able to time our morn­ing corn­flakes to the actu­al arrival time of our bus, rather than hav­ing to wait 20 minutes out­side a jammed bus shel­ter dur­ing a howl­ing south­erly storm.

The dream goes a little like this. You’re hav­ing your cof­fee and your phone softly blips. You look down. A mes­sage says your bus is 3 minutes behind sched­ule and will be at your stop in exactly 8 minutes. You have time to fin­ish your cof­fee before you grab your coat and go. And you arrive at the bus stop at exactly the right time.

Luck­ily for us this is, in time, becom­ing a real­ity.

Read on to to find out why…

Last year the Region­al Coun­cil con­trac­ted UK firm ACIS to provide a sys­tem to cov­er all the pub­lic trans­port, includ­ing trains, across the Great­er Wel­ling­ton area. The acronym you’ll hear lots of around this is “RTPI”: real time pas­sen­ger inform­a­tion.

It works like this. Every thirty seconds, a bus equipped with the RTPI sys­tem will send its GPS loc­a­tion to the cent­ral con­trol­ler. This data is mashed up with inform­a­tion on routes and traffic con­di­tions to gen­er­ate arrival time estim­ates for the stops on the bus route; and these times may be dis­played on one of 250 dis­play boards to be installed in busy bus stops around town. The data will also be avail­able through the Met­link web­site, Google Trans­it, and hope­fully (though unfor­tu­nately this is not assured) through some sort of pro­gram­mers’ inter­face that loc­al developers like Nick (who makes the very cool Wellibus applic­a­tion) can eas­ily build on.

Mean­while, next month there’ll be a pilot install­a­tion on the Num­ber 14 route. Sadly though there won’t be much to see just yet – only a test board report­ing the times of the pilot buses up in the Region­al Coun­cil offices.

From Septem­ber it’s anti­cip­ated that more buses will start to be equipped (see photo), and data from these will become avail­able, rolling out across the entire fleet of buses through to Septem­ber next year.

And then at last: not only will we have finally caught up with Christ­ch­urch, but being wet and cold need no longer be our pen­ance for our com­mit­ment to using pub­lic trans­port.