A new smartphone application will let Hong Kong passengers know exactly how many minutes to wait before a bus arrives, a news story said on September 5. The application, to be launched in October, aims at eliminating the frustration of waiting a long time for a bus, and then seeing three of them turn up at once.
"I know how annoying it is to wait 20 minutes for a 20-minute bus ride," Leo Ho, who developed the application for Nuthon IT Solution, told the South China Morning Post.
The technology relies on passengers swapping information from one bus stop to another in the city of 7.1 million, where 90 percent of all journeys are by public transport, the world's highest rate.
The company has already launched successful applications to show shoppers where the nearest convenience store and automated bank teller are and another showing drivers the location of the nearest public toilet.