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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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

oh my, snakey maths is fun!

The thing that suprised me most when scrolling around are the vast (populated!!!) areas that are without any bus service nearby.

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.