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