Jane Nees BOP Regional Councillor www.janenees.co.nz

The Bay of Plenty Regional Council's Tauranga Bay Hopper buses carried more than 1.6 million passengers during the past year, beating last year's previous record by almost 250,000 passengers.

In the 10 years since the bus service was established, the numbers of people using the service have quadrupled.

And satisfaction levels of bus users is pretty high judging from our recent survey with 88 per cent of bus users describing the reliability of the service as either excellent (36 per cent), very good (37 pre cent) or good (15 per cent).

Ninety-seven per cent of bus users also described the value for money of the service as either excellent (70 per cent), very good (20 per cent) or good (seven per cent).

But in Tauranga, overall use of our public transport is low and our community is very dependent on use of private motor vehicles to get around. Just 0.8 per cent of trips to work are via public transport.

This is because people believe that cars are more convenient, flexible and offer them greater independence. However, as our population grows we will need more people to use public transport to avoid the inevitable increasing congestion on our roads. To help achieve this, we need to ensure our buses are convenient and easy to use.

A way of achieving this is to have frequent bus services, which people feel are reliable.

In many cities, real time passenger information systems are used to provide this sense of reliability. These systems use GPS systems on buses and communicate to users how far away the next bus on the route is. This provides many benefits both to the customers through providing certainty about their travel and to the people operating the buses through providing reliable travel time/speed information to assist in route planning and bus tracking. Such real time information systems have been shown to be a successful way of increasing patronage on buses – especially of people that are non-users or infrequent users of the service

Bay of Plenty Regional Council staff are undertaking an investigation into the options, costs and benefits of such a real time system for use on our bus services. If the benefits are seen to outweigh the costs to purchase and install the system, it is possible that an application for funding will be made and if successful, we may see one of these systems in use in Tauranga. I can't help feeling that should this happen, we will finally have a public transport system that will be really valued by our community – and we will see use of our public transport really take off.

If you have views about this, or any other issue, please contact me on neesj@xtra.co.nz.