Abstract The public transport industry is an essential part of people’s lives. However, the problem associated with the local public transport industry is, travellers usually get frustrated when waiting for a bus to arrive at a bus stop due to uncertainty on when the bus may arrive or if it may arrive at all. This leads to anxiety on the part of the traveller as well as time wastage, especially if this was not planned for in the trip. To solve this, historically GPS receivers are used in conjunction with GSM/GPRS modules or RFID technologies to keep track of the location of the buses. The caveat here is this results in a relatively expensive solution to a fundamental problem travellers face. This is because of associated costs in this solution; namely, the cost of equipping each vehicle with a GPS module and charges incurred on bus operators as these modules send the bus data to a cloud data server before being queried by travellers’ devices. In this project, alternative technologies and location determination algorithms are explored to propose a cost-effective solution using LoRa technology and a variation of the trilateration algorithm to determine the location of a bus. The results from the project confirm the feasibility of using alternative methods to determine vehicle location.