We travellers have often looked at how airlines run their flight booking platforms with the type of efficiency we wish could be recreated closer to home because everybody knows that just having more information about your planned bus ride could do everybody involved in your life a world of good. You would be able to call in ahead if you’re going to be late for example and if you knew for sure that there was perhaps an extra bus on a specific day, you could maybe catch a few extra minutes of much-needed sleep.

Surely the booking system used by airlines could be adapted to our public transport system? That was the burning question up until just recently, with Stagecoach launching their bus app. It’s about time the rest of the public transport sector followed suit and got with the programme. Yes, a lot of websites, apps and other pieces of tech (like wearable tech perhaps) created in this day and age don’t really add much value to our development, but something like a bus app certainly doesn’t fall under that category.

With this new app and hopefully more similar ones to follow, it becomes much more of a convenient experience taking a bus ride to wherever it is you’re headed. I mean where do I even begin?

It’s so convenient being able to check exactly where busses are through tracking their live timetables so that you can adjust your plans accordingly. The convenience thereof is only appreciated that much more because we know exactly how it feels to be frustrated by being made to wait with no way of getting information as to what’s causing the delay and for how long you’re likely to wait.

Certainly the transport operators themselves will save a lot of money too in the same way that Stagecoach saves money by not having to print out every single bus pass ticket bought by each passenger. In case you don’t know it, these are the types of costs which are inevitably passed on to the consumer, so in the same way the savings with regards to those costs would also be passed on to consumers. This incentivises a much more widespread adoption of the technology being developed for the public transport sector — if everyone used the digital ticketing system then there’d be no costs associated with having to print out paper tickets.

I personally love to catch a specific bus which is usually much emptier than many others around the same time so that I can catch a spot in my favourite window seat. You see, it’s the simple things that really make it worthwhile to patronise some of the tech developments aimed specifically at the public transport system. Ultimately it just makes the whole process of using the bus that much more streamlined, saving time and money for both the commuter and the transport operators.

We could most certainly do with more such tech-driven initiatives in all the other public transport services we make use of regularly.