A plurality of vehicle service stations are located in a geographical area, each station includes one or more service bays in which the vehicle is serviced, each bay has an associated lane in which one or more vehicles wait their turn to be serviced in the bay, each lane has one or more sensors for sensing the presence of vehicles in the lane. Each station has a computer which is responsive to the lane sensors for computing the waiting time at the station for a vehicle, the waiting time for each station is displayed on a visual display at the station, the waiting time from each station is also communicated to a host computer centrally located with the geographical region. The host computer has an associated phone messaging system which is responsive to phone calls made from phones in the geographical area, the host computer calculates a recommended station to proceed to and provides a digitized voice of this recommendation through the phone messaging system to a potential customer calling the messaging system over the phone.