Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

rupertlinacre.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 59 posts

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

#21

Post by rrr_oh_man »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #5
rrr_oh_man wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

#23

Post by amiga386 »

d-lowl wrote: post #7

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.

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

#24

Post by RobinL »

danw1979 wrote: post #13
deepvibrations wrote: post #11

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

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

#25

Post by jon-wood »

graemep wrote: post #3
roryirvine wrote: post #2

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.

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

#26

Post by RobinL »

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

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

#28

Post by vidarh »

xnorswap wrote: post #12
rrr_oh_man wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unreliable? Seriously? (I’m not from the UK, it sounds surprising.)

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,…

> 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.

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

#29

Post by RobinL »

RobinL wrote: post #26

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…

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
Post reply on HN