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
It'd be nice to be able to permalink to the view for a specific location
While that'd be useful for things like telling someone else what buses they can get, planning a trip, etc, what I actually tried to do was to link to the Killermont Street bus station in Glasgow; Aztec Camera had a sentimental song about late night departures from there - leaving your friends and heading south to look for work - that runs:
As the ships and the steel
Slip away to the cry of "Compete"
There's a message for us
We can get there by bus
From Killermont Street
And indeed you can...buses all over the place. But I can't link to it :)
it's showing a lot of rail/etc. replacement bus routes, which I wouldn't consider typical as they (hopefully) only run very rarely - such as the "DLR" replacement bus route, and "RB1" replacement bus route for the thames clipper in london
Thanks for this! Really fascinating to see how coverage differs.
I expected the UX to work more like:
- Freeze is on by default (or there is no concept of 'freeze'). I can just move around without my screen turning to a lightning strike of random routes.
Nice idea and appreciate it's a prototype - appears very glitchy for me in Chrome where bus routes appear/disappear when zooming in/out, i.e. it can show no routes at all, but then if you either zoom in or out they appear (some - not all).
Not sure if just me / my browser but thought I would share.
This is in Edinburgh btw - not sure if it's just an issue with that city.
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.
To answer that question, you could also look up bus stops in an app (for example OsmAnd, but there are others) powered by OpenStreetMap data, which I know has all bus stops in the UK, known in government as National Public Transport Access Nodes (NaPTAN), which is pretty much comprehensive, and not tied to any one provider.
The app could then be integrated with other data sources to tell you what bus companies call at that stop, and what their timetables are. At minimum, you should be able to see the unique ATCO code for the bus stop and can google it to find another site that'll give you thata data.
> Writing in Buses magazine, Centrebus Group owner Julian Peddle called the service "a horrendously bureaucratic and over-engineered system designed by well-meaning but clueless officials in London. It’s running late, does not work properly, and has involved the industry and local authorities in vast amounts of needless work. It’s supposedly been running since January 2021, but has not improved things in the wilds of Shropshire, and never will, because government bureaucrats don’t understand the problem, so have no chance of solving it."
My approach is generally just to put the destination into Google Maps and select public transport, it works on the same data source as this and has live tracking
Problem with the buses (at least in London) is that they don't come very often, get stuck in traffic (getting in and out of the bus stop takes forever), often are full and full of feral youth at certain hours, they smell of piss and weed, you need to carefully inspect seats to not ruin your clothes with freshly placed bubble gum and then drivers often take breaks at random, so not only it is slow, the driver will announce evening out of the system and puts their feet up for 10-20 minutes.
If you are able bodied, most journeys you'll arrive quicker by just walking (just be mindful of drug peddlers, mental health cases, poo and maniacs on the scooters).
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.
It's not the most readable in my bit of London (well probably most towns in the UK) because of the similar colours and the way although buses may be going along the same road their lines may deviate and cross (though this may be hard sort out for something like the BL1 vs 53 or 453 because the BL1 is an express bus, probably the same for other super loop buses in London)
Feedback: on mobile when I zoom out, the origin point changes. So I center on where I am at a high zoom level, I see some coloured lines going off screen so I zoom out to see where those lines go, and then they disappear because the origin changes!
It would be nice to have a fixed origin - e.g. click/tap to set it and not have it auto update on zoom changes
I tried a couple of locations in Scotland, and couldn't get one of them work at all. It says there is no bus service in Sleat in the Isle of Skye, even though there is one linking the ferry terminal with other parts of the island, and there is even an FE college there.
the LA transit app is amazing these days. You can even pick an icon and when I see a bus coming I can see if a "friend" is on it. It's not like full on profiles and messages, just a unique icon you can pick from 1000's but I see the same lobster or alien over and over on routes I take. And it means they have the transit app open. So I step on the bus and look everyone in the eyes and try and see if I get lobster or alien vibes.
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.
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
It'd be nice to be able to permalink to the view for a specific location
While that'd be useful for things like telling someone else what buses they can get, planning a trip, etc, what I actually tried to do was to link to the Killermont Street bus station in Glasgow; Aztec Camera had a sentimental song about late night departures from there - leaving your friends and heading south to look for work - that runs:
And indeed you can...buses all over the place. But I can't link to it :)
it's showing a lot of rail/etc. replacement bus routes, which I wouldn't consider typical as they (hopefully) only run very rarely - such as the "DLR" replacement bus route, and "RB1" replacement bus route for the thames clipper in london
Same for "District"
Thanks for this! Really fascinating to see how coverage differs.
I expected the UX to work more like:
- Freeze is on by default (or there is no concept of 'freeze'). I can just move around without my screen turning to a lightning strike of random routes.
- Click once to position the search lens.
Also shout out to https://bustimes.org/map which is a less fun but more informative version of this. My son has spent many a happy hour on this site
Nice idea and appreciate it's a prototype - appears very glitchy for me in Chrome where bus routes appear/disappear when zooming in/out, i.e. it can show no routes at all, but then if you either zoom in or out they appear (some - not all).
Not sure if just me / my browser but thought I would share.
This is in Edinburgh btw - not sure if it's just an issue with that city.
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
To answer that question, you could also look up bus stops in an app (for example OsmAnd, but there are others) powered by OpenStreetMap data, which I know has all bus stops in the UK, known in government as National Public Transport Access Nodes (NaPTAN), which is pretty much comprehensive, and not tied to any one provider.
Here's a website mapping them, you can see the sparseness in some areas of the country: https://www.flosm.org/en/poimap.html?lat=54.2784000&lon=-1.7...
The app could then be integrated with other data sources to tell you what bus companies call at that stop, and what their timetables are. At minimum, you should be able to see the unique ATCO code for the bus stop and can google it to find another site that'll give you thata data.
Example from that map: 3200YNA96776 -> https://bustimes.org/stops/3200YNA96776 -> 821 DalesBus, Keighley - Scar House only on Sundays and bank holidays. Nice use of the government's Bus Open Data Service. Also nice to see the government keeping track of how non-compliant First Bus are: https://data.bus-data.dft.gov.uk/operators/16/
Also, this is probably fair comment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_Open_Data_Service
> Writing in Buses magazine, Centrebus Group owner Julian Peddle called the service "a horrendously bureaucratic and over-engineered system designed by well-meaning but clueless officials in London. It’s running late, does not work properly, and has involved the industry and local authorities in vast amounts of needless work. It’s supposedly been running since January 2021, but has not improved things in the wilds of Shropshire, and never will, because government bureaucrats don’t understand the problem, so have no chance of solving it."
My approach is generally just to put the destination into Google Maps and select public transport, it works on the same data source as this and has live tracking
It reminds me a site where you'd pick a point on map and see where you'd get to in 15/30/etc minutes, including walking iirc.
Then you could even pick *two* points in map and see their intersection in time period, which was great for finding places to meet friends.
Isochrones is the word you’re after.
Even cooler are distance cartograms, where the map distorts according to travel time.
https://riatelab.github.io/distanamo/articles/web_only/with-...
Problem with the buses (at least in London) is that they don't come very often, get stuck in traffic (getting in and out of the bus stop takes forever), often are full and full of feral youth at certain hours, they smell of piss and weed, you need to carefully inspect seats to not ruin your clothes with freshly placed bubble gum and then drivers often take breaks at random, so not only it is slow, the driver will announce evening out of the system and puts their feet up for 10-20 minutes.
If you are able bodied, most journeys you'll arrive quicker by just walking (just be mindful of drug peddlers, mental health cases, poo and maniacs on the scooters).
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.
It's not the most readable in my bit of London (well probably most towns in the UK) because of the similar colours and the way although buses may be going along the same road their lines may deviate and cross (though this may be hard sort out for something like the BL1 vs 53 or 453 because the BL1 is an express bus, probably the same for other super loop buses in London)
Feedback: on mobile when I zoom out, the origin point changes. So I center on where I am at a high zoom level, I see some coloured lines going off screen so I zoom out to see where those lines go, and then they disappear because the origin changes!
It would be nice to have a fixed origin - e.g. click/tap to set it and not have it auto update on zoom changes
It seems to be showing a lot of school services here, which are taking priority over the buses open to the public.
I tried a couple of locations in Scotland, and couldn't get one of them work at all. It says there is no bus service in Sleat in the Isle of Skye, even though there is one linking the ferry terminal with other parts of the island, and there is even an FE college there.
Any plans for the n-hop version, ideally with a limit on the dwell time between successive hops?
I'd be interested to know how far I could get with, say, no more than two changes and no more than 30 minutes waiting at each stop.
the LA transit app is amazing these days. You can even pick an icon and when I see a bus coming I can see if a "friend" is on it. It's not like full on profiles and messages, just a unique icon you can pick from 1000's but I see the same lobster or alien over and over on routes I take. And it means they have the transit app open. So I step on the bus and look everyone in the eyes and try and see if I get lobster or alien vibes.
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.
Google Maps is excellent for bus planning for me. Depends on your local bus company feeding times in to them though.
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.
Unreliable? Seriously?
(I’m not from the UK, it sounds surprising.)
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Maybe have the root fade out behind the bus by time, an hour away as the max, it's faded but you can still see the route.
It assigns importance to the centre of the screen, but that's hard to judge precisely; It really needs a reticle when aligning the map.
>API Key Required [carto.com/basemaps/apikey]
I've Cmd-F'd and can't see any reference to this, so this is a heads-up.
Thanks - author here - I think this is due to the unexpected traffic spike from Hacker News! Will look into
The thing that suprised me most when scrolling around are the vast (populated!!!) areas that are without any bus service nearby.
oh my, snakey maths is fun!
Thank you! My son's favourite at the moment is arithmetic annihilation in two player mode: https://rupertlinacre.com/arithmetic_annihilation/
Cool idea. Would love to see this for other countries too.
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.
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