Ever since I started college in Seoul, I have taken express buses pretty often to go to my hometown and visit my family. It’s very convenient to buy a seat for a bus because there’s an app for it, and one of the best features is the ETA information. By knowing when I would arrive at the terminal, I was able to ask my parents to pick me up around the time whenever I took the late night bus without them having to wait for me more than ten minutes. That’s why I was surprised to find out that the company I started working for recently, Formax Network, was actually the company that provided this service to the Express Bus Reservation App!

I recently visited my family again and I wondered how much time difference there would be between the ETA and the actual time of arrival. So I took a screenshot of the app showing the ETA some time after I departed, and five minutes before I actually arrived at the destination. I arrived at exactly 11pm (23:00), so there was only one minute difference between each ETA. I had used this feature quite a lot before, but I was pretty amazed at how accurate it was.



Being provided real-time updates and the closest ETA has always made me feel secure just by the fact that I know the precise time I would arrive at my destination. Before I started working here, I used to think that traffic information was something that mattered to drivers only, but this little experiment made me realize that it also plays an important role in the daily lives of people who mostly use public transport like me as well.