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.