Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • 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.

    by gnfargbl
  • 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.
    by nephihaha
  • It seems to be showing a lot of school services here, which are taking priority over the buses open to the public.
    by kirun
  • 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

    by mattlondon
  • 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)
    by stuaxo
  • 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
    by d-lowl
  • For Aberdeen it shows me a bus to Shetland, quite an exciting prospect
    by Skwid
  • 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.

    by amiga386
  • 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?

    by deepvibrations
  • The interface is a bit counter intuitive- the search is based on the point at the centre of the current view.
    by danw1979
  • 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).

    by varispeed
  • 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.

    by soleveloper
  • 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-...

    by madaxe_again
  • 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

    by taffronaut
  • 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
    by circuit10
  • 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."

    by amiga386
  • 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.

    by Closi
  • 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

    by RobinL
  • 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
    by RobinL
  • 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.

    by modernerd
  • 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
    by tyxcho
  • 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 :)
    by bazzargh