Show HN: Buslens – where can I get to by bus? (UK) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Buslens – where can I get to by bus? (UK)

rupertlinacre.com

84 pointsRobinL55 comments

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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

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

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.

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"

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 :)

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

For Aberdeen it shows me a bus to Shetland, quite an exciting prospect

Must be the Magic School Bus.

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

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.

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.

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.

I am thinking about whether I can do without a car. I definitely could if busses were better. As it is I think I would end up using taxis a lot.

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

> unopenable windows for "security"

Fenster zu! Es zieht!

https://www.thelocal.de/20190625/only-germans-believe-air-dr...

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.

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.

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.

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?

> Wtf, UK?

We can't even blame this one on the relative lack of infrastructure investment, because busses have never been any better as far as I can tell.

In fact, the only reason the bus fare is as "cheap" as £3 is because of a price cap, which is optional for the bus companies to follow, and has the effect of meaning that they no longer offer return tickets, so you get to choose between the price capped £3 single ticket or a "day saver" £7.

> 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.

> If you see buses in London disappear from a display

Thanks for that explanation! Was an alternative considered—e.g. marking the bus as "lost" instead of removing it altogether? Discounted because of space constraints?

I don't know. We were a third party suppliers and were just handed the rules - we weren't party to the justifications beyond the basics.

Googles stuff is just bad for public transport and walking, it gives "made in California, so we only understand car journeys" vibes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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