Comment by roryirvine
5 days ago
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.
5 days ago
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.)
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.
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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.
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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.
Rural and small town, often yes.
Varies with region. Some big cities (London, Manchester) seem to have good public transport although its been a while since I used a bus in either.
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.