In a bid to save money and regain a little of my moribund fitness, I decided to start walking to work earlier this year. But yesterday, as the rain returned to batter Londoners’ hopes of an Indian summer, I took to the bus.

This is something I reserve for days of truly inclement weather and yesterday reminded me how anathema getting on UK public transport is to me.

The whole process may be improved with a TfL app though, which will soon tell me when my bus is due. Having just tested out the beta version, which appears to be working rather well, it should at least not leave me in the lurch in terms of having a modicum of knowledge about when to actually vacate my flat.

As pointed out by my editor though, the bus arrival notifications at many bus stops in London are far from accurate. For those who’ve been promised a bus is due by those machines watching over their waiting, only to be left standing another five minutes staring desolately into the rain spattered road wondering how things got so bad, you know what I’m talking about. This app appears to offer little more. Look, even the ‘Countdown’ test page has a picture of one such ‘timetable update’ machine included on it:

It seems the timetable data will be based on “bus departure predictions” although there is a promise of “real-time departure information” on  the service’s corporate page. Will it really be real-time? I’m dubious. It’s just a web version of the already unreliable bus stop countdown machines, isn’t it?

Can’t we track every bus and then see exactly where it is via an app? That way we’d really know when the bus was coming. Given our movements are apparently followed by tech companies and Governments alike, surely this wouldn’t be too much of a stretch. Finally, a positive side to tracking software. Huzzah!

But it doesn’t appear that will be the case. Furthermore, having read around the development of this app, it appears TfL is rather late to the game, just like our buses so often are. Scots in Edinburgh and Finns in erm… Finland have grown used to such services already, according to the Guardian.

Oh and if you want to use the text service, you can expect to pay the standard rate for each message. So that’s more money down the (already-flooded) drain if you want to be organised… or avoid the atrocious English weather.