This is a quick prototype, made for my 7yo who loves buses.
A few tips:
- Click the freeze icon to be able to zoom and pan without it changing the location of the lens
- Double click to position the lens
Thanks for feedback about the data. The bus stop and route data comes from the Department for Transport’s Bus Open Data Service (BODS), using the national GTFS feed. It seems some things like Manchester metro creep in.
All these caveats aside, as soon as I got this working it felt like a promising direction. I will pay attention to everyone's comments and suggestions and iterate! Thank you!
Incidentally there's a bunch of other free stuff I built for my 7yo on the root domain
This answers a question that I often have in the UK - "Do I have a non-zero chance of being able to get (near to) to somewhere by bus?". There's no clear way to answer that since UK buses were deregulated in 1986 [1]. For me, this isn't a tool to plan an immediate journey. Yes, UK buses are sparse and unreliable in rural areas. Often it's quicker to walk 1-2 miles than to wait for a bus. The service might not even run every day. Personally I've had pretty good experience of occasional recreational travel on main bus routes outside of cities and towns in Wales which is why I am interested in this.
Getting strange issues whereby routes appear and disappear as I zoom out?
I understand some routes should change as you zoom, but this seems much more random For example; I might see 5 routes zoomed in, but I zoom out one level and they all disappear completely?
Some of things it shows for Manchester are not buses (i.e. metrolink). Where does the data come from?
Edit: also Flixbus or National Express are arguably not a bus services either
Other websites for "bus times" that show the NL2 ferry service from Aberdeen to Lerwick say their data comes from the Traveline National Data Set (TNDS): https://www.travelinedata.org.uk/
> TNDS contains public transport timetables for bus, light rail, tram and ferry services in Great Britain.
Might be nice to filter it to show only those buses which are available in the next hour or two - there's no need to display night buses during the day and vice versa.
Exactly what I thought. Its also a long way short of what you need to plan a journey that involves changing buses.
Where I live it looks like I could do a lot by bus looking at just the routes, but they are infrequent and unreliable so I usually have to drive everywhere.
I don't think this is designed as a journey planning tool, it's a data visualisation showing the extent of your local bus routes and doesn't really need to be any more than that.
Sadly yes. Some bus companies are very reliable (traffic jams permitting), but there are definitely times when they aren't, and I've used rural routes where the hourly bus might just not turn up, which makes them completely infeasible for commuting or appointments.
To replace cars with buses for trips you really need them to be rock solid.
Yeah I think the most stressed I've ever been about punctuality was when I was dependent on a rural bus to get to work on time. I love rural Britain but if you can't drive for whatever reason, it's often not feasible to live there.
Outside of London, Manchester, Nottingham and a few selected other places, busses in England tend to be fairly dire, especially as you get out to smaller towns and villages.
Even if the routes are there, it's not uncommon for the actual busses to bare little resemblance to the published timetable.
In some places you'll get fancy live information screens which happily announce the arrival of a bus that doesn't exist, or more frequently, to simply state that the information isn't available, please check the paper boards.
Bus routes tend to be especially bad in rural towns and villages, but even in my fairly reasonably large town, it's quicker and more convenient for me to walk the 1.3 miles to the train station than try to get a bus.
If I plug in "bus" on google maps planner, it has me walk 20 minutes to a bus stop to sit on a bus for 7 minutes, versus a ~25 minute walk.
Alternatively, I could walk 5 minutes to a nearer stop, wait 30 minutes for the next bus, which itself then takes 26 minutes to get to the bus station, which is itself a 3-4 minute walk from the bus station to the train station itself.
And that's assuming the bus is on time running to schedule, and doesn't then hit traffic.
I'd also be paying £3 one-way for this privilege.
Once you're inside the TFL zone everything changes and busses are frequent, generally reliable, and cheaper.
> In some places you'll get fancy live information screens which happily announce the arrival of a bus that doesn't exist
I worked on one of the systems for that many years ago, and one of the reasons TFL works better than many of the others is that TFL has (or at least had) extremely strict rules on what we were allowed to show.
E.g. if the display could not contact our servers, we were required to remove the buses after about a minute to prevent showing stale data (same freshness criteria applied to what our servers were allowed to forward to the frontend. We also needed to prove we handled clock drift correctly for the same reason. They put us through extensive testing to ensure no stale data before any displays went live.
If you see buses in London disappear from a display, those criteria will often be the reason - TFL considered it better that a bus was missing than that people would be incorrectly told it was close.
I've been to the Balkans, Central Asia, and rural Mexico for extended periods and they're all better than that (even if they might lack fancy digital screens, which is rapidly changing also).
The state of transport outside London, even just outside London, is so bad. I remember when London got the Siemens GPS trackers in each bus that enabled the live departure screens. Amy Winehouse was in the charts, that's how long ago it was.
It depends where you are, some areas have very good bus services and other terrible ones. Almost everywhere has been forbidden from having a more centralised approach and so most places are a mash of random companies with very different approaches and reliabilities.
This is really cool as a way to determine which directions and how far you can go from a given point.
I think a good improvement to this tool would be an optional “number of connections” plus desired maximum walking distance. That’d be really useful for your average OAP trying to find a rough plan for a long distance journey by bus.
Author here. Wasn't expecting this to blow up!
This is a quick prototype, made for my 7yo who loves buses.
A few tips:
- Click the freeze icon to be able to zoom and pan without it changing the location of the lens
- Double click to position the lens
Thanks for feedback about the data. The bus stop and route data comes from the Department for Transport’s Bus Open Data Service (BODS), using the national GTFS feed. It seems some things like Manchester metro creep in.
All these caveats aside, as soon as I got this working it felt like a promising direction. I will pay attention to everyone's comments and suggestions and iterate! Thank you!
Incidentally there's a bunch of other free stuff I built for my 7yo on the root domain
Cool idea. Would love to see this for other countries too.
This answers a question that I often have in the UK - "Do I have a non-zero chance of being able to get (near to) to somewhere by bus?". There's no clear way to answer that since UK buses were deregulated in 1986 [1]. For me, this isn't a tool to plan an immediate journey. Yes, UK buses are sparse and unreliable in rural areas. Often it's quicker to walk 1-2 miles than to wait for a bus. The service might not even run every day. Personally I've had pretty good experience of occasional recreational travel on main bus routes outside of cities and towns in Wales which is why I am interested in this.
[1] https://www.regulation.org.uk/archive-buses.html
Getting strange issues whereby routes appear and disappear as I zoom out?
I understand some routes should change as you zoom, but this seems much more random For example; I might see 5 routes zoomed in, but I zoom out one level and they all disappear completely?
The interface is a bit counter intuitive- the search is based on the point at the centre of the current view.
Click the freeze icon to freeze, or double click to choose a location for the lens
Some of things it shows for Manchester are not buses (i.e. metrolink). Where does the data come from? Edit: also Flixbus or National Express are arguably not a bus services either
Other websites for "bus times" that show the NL2 ferry service from Aberdeen to Lerwick say their data comes from the Traveline National Data Set (TNDS): https://www.travelinedata.org.uk/
> TNDS contains public transport timetables for bus, light rail, tram and ferry services in Great Britain.
For Aberdeen it shows me a bus to Shetland, quite an exciting prospect
Must be the Magic School Bus.
The thing that suprised me most when scrolling around are the vast (populated!!!) areas that are without any bus service nearby.
Might be nice to filter it to show only those buses which are available in the next hour or two - there's no need to display night buses during the day and vice versa.
Exactly what I thought. Its also a long way short of what you need to plan a journey that involves changing buses.
Where I live it looks like I could do a lot by bus looking at just the routes, but they are infrequent and unreliable so I usually have to drive everywhere.
I don't think this is designed as a journey planning tool, it's a data visualisation showing the extent of your local bus routes and doesn't really need to be any more than that.
Google Maps is excellent for bus planning for me. Depends on your local bus company feeding times in to them though.
Unreliable? Seriously?
(I’m not from the UK, it sounds surprising.)
Sadly yes. Some bus companies are very reliable (traffic jams permitting), but there are definitely times when they aren't, and I've used rural routes where the hourly bus might just not turn up, which makes them completely infeasible for commuting or appointments.
To replace cars with buses for trips you really need them to be rock solid.
Yeah I think the most stressed I've ever been about punctuality was when I was dependent on a rural bus to get to work on time. I love rural Britain but if you can't drive for whatever reason, it's often not feasible to live there.
Jesus.
I thought Germany was bad with no A/C and unopenable windows for "security" (= cost savings).
At least the busses* are on time.
* definitely not the trains, though
Outside of London, Manchester, Nottingham and a few selected other places, busses in England tend to be fairly dire, especially as you get out to smaller towns and villages.
Even if the routes are there, it's not uncommon for the actual busses to bare little resemblance to the published timetable.
In some places you'll get fancy live information screens which happily announce the arrival of a bus that doesn't exist, or more frequently, to simply state that the information isn't available, please check the paper boards.
Bus routes tend to be especially bad in rural towns and villages, but even in my fairly reasonably large town, it's quicker and more convenient for me to walk the 1.3 miles to the train station than try to get a bus.
If I plug in "bus" on google maps planner, it has me walk 20 minutes to a bus stop to sit on a bus for 7 minutes, versus a ~25 minute walk.
Alternatively, I could walk 5 minutes to a nearer stop, wait 30 minutes for the next bus, which itself then takes 26 minutes to get to the bus station, which is itself a 3-4 minute walk from the bus station to the train station itself.
And that's assuming the bus is on time running to schedule, and doesn't then hit traffic.
I'd also be paying £3 one-way for this privilege.
Once you're inside the TFL zone everything changes and busses are frequent, generally reliable, and cheaper.
> In some places you'll get fancy live information screens which happily announce the arrival of a bus that doesn't exist
I worked on one of the systems for that many years ago, and one of the reasons TFL works better than many of the others is that TFL has (or at least had) extremely strict rules on what we were allowed to show.
E.g. if the display could not contact our servers, we were required to remove the buses after about a minute to prevent showing stale data (same freshness criteria applied to what our servers were allowed to forward to the frontend. We also needed to prove we handled clock drift correctly for the same reason. They put us through extensive testing to ensure no stale data before any displays went live.
If you see buses in London disappear from a display, those criteria will often be the reason - TFL considered it better that a bus was missing than that people would be incorrectly told it was close.
That sounds absolutely terrible.
I've been to the Balkans, Central Asia, and rural Mexico for extended periods and they're all better than that (even if they might lack fancy digital screens, which is rapidly changing also).
Wtf, UK?
The state of transport outside London, even just outside London, is so bad. I remember when London got the Siemens GPS trackers in each bus that enabled the live departure screens. Amy Winehouse was in the charts, that's how long ago it was.
It depends where you are, some areas have very good bus services and other terrible ones. Almost everywhere has been forbidden from having a more centralised approach and so most places are a mash of random companies with very different approaches and reliabilities.
It seems to be showing a lot of school services here, which are taking priority over the buses open to the public.
This is really cool as a way to determine which directions and how far you can go from a given point.
I think a good improvement to this tool would be an optional “number of connections” plus desired maximum walking distance. That’d be really useful for your average OAP trying to find a rough plan for a long distance journey by bus.
UK only.