Back in the day, finding out when buses ran involved picking up a leaflet, buying a timetable book or (if you were lucky) reading the information at your nearest bus stop. Timetable books are now history, and even leaflets are hard to come by – so unless there’s a timetable at the bus stop AND it’s been kept up to date – then the best source of information is online. Or is it?
It certainly should be, as the every bus company is required to submit it’s timetables digitally at regular intervals onto an open-source government website from which on-line providers can all draw down the same information. But, as I found out a year ago, it’s not always as simple as that – and technicalities can very quickly destroy the whole process.
Take last year as an example. Stagecoach uploaded a new timetable dataset to the government website and ‘forgot’ to mark the main bus stop in Notton as a timetable point in their data, so none of the online timetables included any reference to buses calling at Notton. Fortunately, Stagecoach published its own timetables online in pdf format, so the information was out there – providing you knew where to look for it. Several months passed before either West Yorkshire or South Yorkshire Combined Authorities updated their web pages to show the times of buses from Notton, all down to a simple error by Stagecoach in not ‘flagging’ the Notton bus stop as a timing point on their dataset.
One year on, and our bus service has recently increased to half-hourly, with extra buses running into the late evening. So, a week after its introduction, how easy is it to find out about the new bus times?
Every bus stop in the village has a list of bus departures displayed, courtesy of West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA). Except that none of the displays have been updated, and there’s no mention of a change to the timetable. So that’s no good.
There’s also a QR code on each stop that takes you to the WYCA Live departures page – and, using your home postcode, you can select your nearest bus stops – as shown below.
Sure enough, the journey planner does provide details of the new half-hourly service:
However, if you’re travelling into Wakefield there appears to be a problem:
The journey planner shows two buses an hour, but only one of the two is destined for Wakefield – and the other apparently terminates at Royston, which (for those who know) is actually halfway back in the opposite direction towards Barnsley! Another data problem maybe?
Elsewhere on the WYCA website is a search facility for bus timetables – sadly, this is no help either as the search only comes up with the other Service 59 bus route in the area – twenty miles away in Holmfirth.
So where is the timetable? It surely exists somewhere in the WYCA databank, but where? The other route into the data is through the WYCA Journey planner – actually provided by Moovit on behalf of the authority, and this offers half-hourly buses to Wakefield (with no mention of alternate buses terminating at Royston. The same database, but a rather different interpretation? But alas, no link to a full timetable there either.
But what about the operator’s website? Stagecoach were always pretty good at providing pdf pages online, so let’s take a look:
It’s all there if you look through the 15 pages on offer – but unlike previous versions, the algorithm has chosen to separate alternate journeys (numbered 59a) onto a separate page, so it’s easy to misread this as only an hourly service. Sorry, Stagecoach – that’s not helpful at all.
So, where else can we find a bus timetable? Another source is bustimes.org – and behold, the full service is there, albeit in a rather clumsy, database output format – but proving, at least, that the Open Source dataset does exist.
The original on-line resource (Traveline) also offers a pdf output which, at first sight, shows the full half-hourly service but as this extract from the Monday to Friday timetable shows, it’s not actually the full service, as journeys annotated with a note [2] beneath them only run on a bank holiday Monday, when the Sunday timetable is in operation. And there’s a whole different search required to find the alternating 59a journeys.
So, my last chance to find the full timetable is with the South Yorkshire Combined Authority’s ‘Travel South Yorkshire’ website. The journey planner certainly looks promising, suggesting a half hourly service to Wakefield is available:
There’s also a link from each departure to download the timetable – though it’s not actually the full timetable, it’s only for journeys that carry the same route number as the one you selected on the planner – so if you were looking at a departure on the 59, you are only offered a 59 timetable, not including the alternate 59a journeys (which follow the same route from Notton to Wakefield). So only half a timetable once more.
Before I completely lose the will to live, I revisit the Travel South Yorkshire website and try a timetable search for the 59 bus route – and up pops a pdf file containing the full service, all in one table! It’s clearly not a direct reproduction of the database output – or if it is, then it’s been interpreted by an actual human to ensure that it shows my full service!
Well done, South Yorkshire Combined Authority, you’ve saved the day – and now I have a reference document that will help me prepare a one page summary for the community where I live – which is not actually in South Yorkshire.
You can download a copy of my community summary here
Island Transportation 
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