please empty your brain below
I accept that it seems that some of us resist change - but a key element in making any change successful is education and explanation. And on that tfl has done nothing. Features we know and understand has vanished. The new stuff might be useful but you apparently need to be clairvoyant to know how to find it or use it.
I'm still spitting tacks.
Once you HAVE identified a stop the spider map that comes up will show you the entire route of each bus serving that stop - (including how the buses get there as well as where they go next) but not where any other buses at adjacent stops go from, or which stop you need to go in the other direction. In other words, you need to know which stop your bus goes from before you can find out which bus it is!
Thanks for keeping track of it all DG.
"Could not find any results to your search, please try again."
The "Cowley Mill Road/Waterloo Road" location is baffling. I live in Uxbridge; there has never been a stop anywhere near where it is shown and no buses - TfL or otherwise - goes past. That corner of Uxbridge is a bus desert. Even the once a week mobility bus was stopped about 10 years ago.
i just went to the new site - looked up Live Deparature boards for my nearest stations (i'm about to go out), and it said "Unable to show live departures".
So i called up the old website, did the same .. and it showed the live departure boards no problem.
This is something really basic, so what you've done here is take away a working website, and replace it with something less functional.
Perhaps you rolled it out too soon?
You should have let all of US (the transport geeks, you know who we are) loose on first, we've have found all the bugs for you, reported them back - then launch it.
Of course "they're" reading this.
You will notice the "improvements" soon!
If you go to Tottenham Hale Tube station or Bus Station, there is no mention of the fact that it is a building site at the moment with all the buses diverted.
HOWEVER if you go to Tottenham Hale National Rail station view, you get
"HALE ROAD/TOTTENHAM HALE BUS STATION, N17 - ROUTE 192: From 0600 Friday 19th October 2013 until Friday 284th July 2014, Tottenham Hale bus Station will be closed for re development and buses will be subject to changes in stop and standing arrangments or be on diversion.
HALE ROAD/TOTTENHAM HALE BUS STATION, N17 - ROUTES 41 N41: From 2300 Friday 19th October 2013 until Friday 4th July 2014, Tottenham Hale bus Station will be closed for re development and buses will be subject to changes in stop and standing arrangments or be on diversion."
Yes, yes they are arrangements not arrangments
However the mapping info that TfL are deploying on this site is not up to date. Looking at nearby stops there are two stops shown when in reality only 1 now exists. There has been quite a lot of bus stop rationaliation in my local area in recent weeks. This means the "personal spider map" is incorrect. One of the stops at Tottenham Hale brings up no departure info nor is the new stop code recognised. Again whatever base info they are using is not up to date. I have given TfL feedback on this T Hale error. Quite how you can have the old Countdown system being correct and this new presentation of the same data being wrong I know not.
@ Briantist - the info you found about disruptions is what is entered by the people at Centrecomm from a variety of internal info sources. Regrettably not every person who types in the entries is a skilled typist. I've no idea if the internal system even allows a spell check. This info has been of mixed quality for a long time. On one hand it is good to have the info but it really MUST be entered properly and checked before publication to the outside world.
I agree with the other comments about the inherent weaknesses of TfL's approach needing you to know what stop a service uses before your "personal spider map" is of any use. I couldn't even get the system to recognise St James's Park station earlier today or even 55 Broadway. The system seems incapable of dealing with street names or building addresses - even a TfL HQ location!
I shall have to give the functionality a go when I'm somewhere in London where my local knowledge is relatively poor to see if it works for me when I'm in "dimbo" mode about the buses.
DG is quite right that the beta version of the site did provide timetabled bus departure info but it seems to have gone. It is important that TfL restore this info and here's why - night buses. For most of the week my nearest night bus runs half hourly. However it starts only 5 mins away from my stop and it is not at all unusual for Live Departure to only show the bus about 1-2 mins before it's due. Night buses usually encounter little traffic so move much faster - again cutting the margin to reach the stop. Therefore you absolutely must have the timetable available to you so you can get there in good time and *then* look at Live Departure info on your phone if you wish. This issue is replicated across London on low frequency services, on Sundays and early mornings / late evenings when plenty of routes only run half hourly or hourly. In many cases you will get better advance warning via Live Departures but you still need a timetable for planning purposes.
I believe we will also get Quadrant Maps back too. If not then the "commitment" on the TfL Digital Blog will turn out to be false.
Much easier to launch it and just say it has "teething problems". A focus group of geeks...the same sort of people that unleashed the Y2K bug panic! No thanks. Let the everyday users point out what good and bad.
Actually its to the nearest quarter minute on lines with timetables for automatic trains - that's the Central, Jubilee and Victoria and the Northern to follow sometime this year.
Now I know.
Can they do good coffee shops next?
Almost like moving from XP to Win 8! not everything works. Maybe give it time and it will (the site that is now Win 8).
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