Disclosed herein is a method and apparatus for providing traffic information of public transportation means, such as a bus, and utilizing the provided information. A method of encoding public traffic information according to the present invention creates, for an arbitrary bus stop, a first component including the number of buses to arrive at the bus stop and as many pieces of bus information as the created number of buses, and incorporates the first component along with an identifier allocated to the bus stop into a second component. The second component is then incorporated into a transfer message. A sequence of messages, each being constructed as described above, is wirelessly transmitted.