WAITING for the bus could soon become a thing of the past thanks to Transport for London's new iBus system.
Today TfL said all of the capital's buses have now been fitted with electronic tour guides and onboard satnav systems to give passengers information.
Known as iBus (until Apple's lawyers find out about it,at least), the system gives on board ‘next stop’ announcements, and has now been fitted to all 8,000 London buses.
It uses a combination of GPS satellites to pinpoint the bus’s location, and GPRS mobile phone technology to transmit information to a control centre. This can then be used to update the ‘countdown’ boards that have been appearing at bus stops.
More importantly, it paves the way for some potentially great mobile applications for the system.
Boris Johnson has already pledged to introduce a mobile phone version of the service, allowing passengers to easily see when buses will arrive from their home, or while walking to a bus stop.
“This system will lay the foundation for the delivery of bus information direct to mobile phones or the internet,” he said at the system's launch.
For commuters, it could be a dream come true - you'll be able to glance at your mobile phone to see a live departure board for your local bus station, meaning you can stay at home a bit longer and time your walk perfectly to arrive just as the bus does.
However, there is a problem - TfL seems in no hurry to launch these web and mobile phone applications. In an ideal world, the data would be made available online in a format third party firms can use, but so far there is no sign of this happening.
In an era when even the Government is thinking about how it can 'free its data' online, it seems this is the perfect test case for TfL, and one can only imagine how useful some of the applications that would be created would be.
So come on Tfl, give us our bus data - if ever there was a mobile phone application every Londoner would welcome, this it is...