StopBoard - free live bus departure board for every stop in Great Britain

[josephmjustin]

Hi all,
I've built a free site called StopBoard (stopboard.uk) that shows real-time bus departures for any bus stop in Great Britain. 309,000+ stops covered.

It's aimed at stops that don't have an electronic departure board. You search for your stop and get live ETAs, delay info, and bus position on a map. No app to download, no account needed.

England has full live tracking. Scotland and Wales have scheduled timetables for now.


Would appreciate any feedback, especially if the data looks off for your area.

Justin

 

[JKP]

Hi all,
I've built a free site called StopBoard (stopboard.uk) that shows real-time bus departures for any bus stop in Great Britain. 309,000+ stops covered.

It's aimed at stops that don't have an electronic departure board. You search for your stop and get live ETAs, delay info, and bus position on a map. No app to download, no account needed.

England has full live tracking. Scotland and Wales have scheduled timetables for now.


Would appreciate any feedback, especially if the data looks off for your area.

Justin

Peter Hogg 20 Kelso, Jedburgh, Hawick is missing from all stops.

 

[josephmjustin]

Thanks for flagging. Peter Hogg's services aren't in the national GTFS feed that StopBoard uses, so their routes through Hawick aren't showing. The stops are there but the timetable data for that operator isn't available in the feed. I'll keep an eye on it. Kelso and Jedburgh should be showing services from other operators though.

 

[SalopBuses]

Great idea and everything but this feels vibe coded.

 

[aaronspence]

Great idea and everything but this feels vibe coded.

Absolutely a Claude special.

I notice on the stop I tested it listed every bus twice.

 

[Farigiraf]

England has full live tracking

What do you mean by this? I've found a number of routes in England which don't appear to have an option to show the bus live on a map.

Also, trying to search for any railway station stop is hopeless. There must be a few hundred stops just called 'Railway Station' and if you try to narrow it down (e.g. Cambridge railway station or Norwich railway station) it shows zero results.

Absolutely a Claude special.

It would be helpful (arguably it should be a necessity) to disclose beforehand if something was created with AI. It helps know whether something's worth actually relying on or not.

 

[josephmjustin]

Absolutely a Claude special.

I notice on the stop I tested it listed every bus twice.

View attachment 208900

Thanks for spotting that. It was a data deduplication issue where overlapping timetable entries were showing the same departure twice. Fixed now. If you check that stop again it should look right.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 4 Aug 2026 ==

What do you mean by this? I've found a number of routes in England which don't appear to have an option to show the bus live on a map.


It would be helpful (arguably it should be a necessity) to disclose beforehand if something was created with AI. It helps know whether something's worth actually relying on or not.

Live tracking shows when there's an active bus on that route sending GPS data through the national feed. If no buses are currently being tracked on a route, you'll see scheduled times instead.

 

[Teapot42]

One issue I noticed was that it's not a lot of use to anyone near the start of a route. If you could replicate the system Bustimes uses to work out which service comes next for a particular vehicle you would be able to indicate potential delays. It likely won't work for high frequency services, but then anyone on that sort of route is unlikely to use it.

 

[stevieinselby]

I don't know where I am or where I'm going!
I'm at Market Place, there's a bus coming from Bus Station that is going to Market Place, and another bus that is going to Bus Station.
It would be more helpful to know that I'm at Guisborough Market Place, the next bus has come from Middlesbrough Bus Station and is going to Loftus Market Place, and the bus after that is going to Whitby Bus Station. I know some of this is down to how different operators code the information, but it needs a better way than this to interpret it!




The "search by name" function is not great. If I type in "Whitby", it gives me a couple of stops around Whitby for places like the Abbey or Golf Club, and then a load of streets called "Whitby <something>" in towns and villages the length and breadth of the country, but no "Whitby Bus Station" or however it is entered in the system. Putting in a comma breaks the search even if what you have typed is the exact name of the entry, eg "Piccadilly, York", as soon as that comma goes in it just gives up. And because the list only gives the first 30 entries it finds and doesn't accept NAPTAN codes, there will be a lot of stops that it is quite simply impossible to bring up in the search box.

So, first suggestion for the text search is to look at the town name first and then the local name. If I type in "Whitby", give me stops in Whitby first, not stops on streets called "Whitby Avenue". If I want "Whitby Avenue" and "Whitby" comes up first then I can keep typing. If I want Whitby and "Whitby Avenue" comes up first, I can't type less.
Second suggestion is to fix whatever is going wrong with commas, so that if someone types in the exact name of a stop then it finds it.
Third suggestion is to try to find a way to put the main departure point for a town/city at the top. It might be as simple as prioritising any stops where the local name is Bus Station, Railway Station, High Street or Market Place, if there is no smarter way to determine which the main stops are – sure, that won't work for every town, but it will cover most of them.
Fourth suggestion is that having to look at individual stops instead of a cluster is unhelpful – it makes it more difficult for people to be sure they're looking at the right stop for the route and direction they want, especially if they have options for routes they can take from multiple stops nearby. Being able to see departures from all stops in a cluster as an option would be good.

 

[James H]

A feature to easily jump from the currently visible stop to the 2 or 3 closest other stops would be helpful in town centres and bus stations etc where stops are clustered and you might want to check several stops.

eg at Bournemouth station my buses home can leave from any of four stops.

 

[josephmjustin]

That's a good point, thanks. Definitely something I want to improve.

One issue I noticed was that it's not a lot of use to anyone near the start of a route. If you could replicate the system Bustimes uses to work out which service comes next for a particular vehicle you would be able to indicate potential delays. It likely won't work for high frequency services, but then anyone on that sort of route is unlikely to use it.

That's a good point, thanks. Definitely something I want to improve.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 4 Aug 2026 ==

I don't know where I am or where I'm going!
I'm at Market Place, there's a bus coming from Bus Station that is going to Market Place, and another bus that is going to Bus Station.
It would be more helpful to know that I'm at Guisborough Market Place, the next bus has come from Middlesbrough Bus Station and is going to Loftus Market Place, and the bus after that is going to Whitby Bus Station. I know some of this is down to how different operators code the information, but it needs a better way than this to interpret it!

View attachment 208902


The "search by name" function is not great. If I type in "Whitby", it gives me a couple of stops around Whitby for places like the Abbey or Golf Club, and then a load of streets called "Whitby <something>" is towns and villages the length and breadth of the country, but no "Whitby Bus Station" or however it is entered in the system. Putting in a comma breaks the search even if what you have typed is the exact name of the entry, eg "Piccadilly, York", as soon as that comma goes in it just gives up. And because the list only gives the first 30 entries it finds and doesn't accept NAPTAN codes, there will be a lot of stops that it is quite simply impossible to bring up in the search box.

So, first suggestion for the text search is to look at the town name first and then the local name. If I type in "Whitby", give me stops in Whitby first, not stops on streets called "Whitby Avenue". If I want "Whitby Avenue" and "Whitby" comes up first then I can keep typing. If I want Whitby and "Whitby Avenue" comes up first, I can't type less.
Second suggestion is to fix whatever is going wrong with commas, so that if someone types in the exact name of a stop then it finds it.
Third suggestion is to try to find a way to put the main departure point for a town/city at the top. It might be as simple as prioritising any stops where the local name is Bus Station, Railway Station, High Street or Market Place, if there is no smarter way to determine which the main stops are – sure, that won't work for every town, but it will cover most of them.
Fourth suggestion is that having to look at individual stops instead of a cluster is unhelpful – it makes it more difficult for people to be sure they're looking at the right stop for the route and direction they want, especially if they have options for routes they can take from multiple stops nearby. Being able to see departures from all stops in a cluster as an option would be good.

Thanks for the detailed feedback, really helpful. The search definitely needs work, especially putting local stops ahead of street name matches elsewhere. The comma issue is a bug I'll get fixed. And you're right about the vague destination names like 'Bus Station' without the town. I've got ideas for improving that. Appreciate you taking the time to test it properly.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 4 Aug 2026 ==

A feature to easily jump from the currently visible stop to the 2 or 3 closest other stops would be helpful in town centres and bus stations etc where stops are clustered and you might want to check several stops.

eg at Bournemouth station my buses home can leave from any of four stops.

That would be really useful, especially at bus stations. Noted, it's on my list, thanks.

 

[JKP]

Thanks for flagging. Peter Hogg's services aren't in the national GTFS feed that StopBoard uses, so their routes through Hawick aren't showing. The stops are there but the timetable data for that operator isn't available in the feed. I'll keep an eye on it. Kelso and Jedburgh should be showing services from other operators though.

Peter Hogg K08 and X74 are both showing.

 

[DelW]

I don't know where I am or where I'm going!
I'm at Market Place, there's a bus coming from Bus Station that is going to Market Place, and another bus that is going to Bus Station.
It would be more helpful to know that I'm at Guisborough Market Place, the next bus has come from Middlesbrough Bus Station and is going to Loftus Market Place, and the bus after that is going to Whitby Bus Station. I know some of this is down to how different operators code the information, but it needs a better way than this to interpret it!

I think this is a by-product of a much bigger problem than just for this website or similar ones - that most bus stop identifiers are useless to anyone who doesn't know the area already. If I look at the stops on a long rural bus route, many stop names will be things like "crossroads", or "church", or "filling station", or "post office" (or even worse "old post office"), with no identifier of which village they're in. One route I was on this year (I forget which) had a stop named "bungalows".

Some other assorted problems:
The 28 between Taunton and Minehead has two stops just called "garage", in different villages several miles apart. The main stop in the centre of a village near me is called "crossroads" but the nearby road junction isn't, it's a three way mini roundabout with a fourth minor road which is a side turning off one of the approaches. Many stops are named after pubs or other businesses that closed years ago, like a "Homebase" stop near me.

Until names are edited to make their location more easily identifiable, this problem will persist, but I don't see any likelihood of that happening. Good luck to the OP and others whose websites and apps can ameliorate it to an extent.

 

[Shrewbly]

I have to say this works really well for my local stops, so much appreciated. It probably helps that at least some of the stops have half sensible names (I'll ignore the one further along the route called 'Shops')!

 

[PeterC]

If I let it find my nearest stop it works well I get the stop name without the locality but a search on the locality gives the stop.

The only trouble is that it hyper-accurately gives me the nearest stop. If I need the stop on the other side if the road there is no obvious way to flip direction apart from typing the stop name into the search box.

Pairs of stops don't seen to be distinguished except by destination. The operator and Bustimes both tell you if you need to be adjacent or opposite or the letter displayed on the stop if there is one.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 5 Aug 2026 ==

To digress slightly about locality data Carousel buses in Chesham go to "Chesham, Broadway" while Red Rose services suddenly dash off to a village in the Cotswolds

 

[stevieinselby]

Also with the geolocation "snap to stop", that's all very well if you are standing precisely at the stop, but it doesn't give you any options in case the very nearest stop isn't the one you want. So if you want to check how the bus is running before you leave the house/pub/etc, it might not help – eg, to catch the bus into town, I want the bus stop on the far side of the road, but it will only give me the stop on the near side.

 

[duncombec]

I'd echo some of the other comments:

- My phone snaps to the nearest stop. Unfortunately, that's only served in one direction, going the opposite way to 95% of the journeys I'd take from that stop. I have to walk a minute or two further away to get into town, but can only search for that manually.

- My desktop, however, snaps to a random stop I'd never heard of three miles away, which curiously isn't the usual random location Google Maps thinks I'm at.

- Agreeing with others over the descriptors for the end destination - obviously an issue with the background data supplied, but one stop is referred to two different ways by the same operator! As others have suggested, "Village Centre" isn't overly helpful! (Especially when in this case, it's actually not in the centre of the village, but the bypass outside!)

- I overlooked "Track this bus" to start with, so when one note advised me to check the map, my first thought was "what map"?

- The stop naming may be an issue in areas with lots of stops called the same thing, or when searching: Take the example of King Street in Maidstone. If I type "King Street" there are five different stops for Maidstone as well as others for other towns, whereas if I type Maidstone first, I don't even get a King Street option before the list runs out of room.

 

[TUC]

I allowed the site to track my location and it correctly identified the nearest bus stop. The problem is that it has only identified it in one direction, the one which is only two stops from the terminus rather than the direction into town, and so only shows the journeys in that direction.

 

[riceuten]

All stops in Stevenage shown as per timetable, no live data - bustimes dot org has this (mostly)

 

[Falcon1200]

I allowed the site to track my location and it correctly identified the nearest bus stop. The problem is that it has only identified it in one direction

I have the same issue; It has picked up the stop literally right outside the house in which I am typing this - On the other side of the road! But not the one on the same side.

This is still a great potential resource however.

 

[SalopBuses]

Absolutely a Claude special.

I notice on the stop I tested it listed every bus twice.

View attachment 208900

Yep think I'll be sticking with bustimes.org, besides I refuse to use anything that's vibe coded I get people have great ideas but please learn to code and not vibe code

 

[josephmjustin]

Been through all the feedback in this thread, thanks for taking the time to write it up, genuinely useful.


Here's what's changed since:


Search

• Fixed the bug where a comma in the search box broke results entirely
• If you allow location, ranking now favours stops near you and in the place you searched for, ahead of street names elsewhere in the country that happen to share the word
• Bus stations and railway stations are boosted toward the top of results for a town search
• Search now matches on multiple words in any order, has some typo tolerance, and the results limit has been raised

Destinations

• Generic headsigns like "Bus Station" now show the actual town they're heading to, instead of just the raw operator text

Bookmarks

• If you've bookmarked two stops with the same name, they're now labelled with the main destination from that stop, so you can tell them apart

Clustered stops

• Added a nearby stops feature: a list (and map) of the other stops near the one you're looking at, with live routes and distance, so you can check or jump between stops at a station or town centre without re-searching

 

[James H]

Thank you that is a great improvement! Have got it saved to my home screen

 

[GusB]

Yep think I'll be sticking with bustimes.org, besides I refuse to use anything that's vibe coded I get people have great ideas but please learn to code and not vibe code

I had to look up what "vibe-coded" meant and I'm still none the wiser. I'm not a programmer and I suspect that most of the people who would use StopBoard aren't either. I really don't care if it's written in BASIC, Turbo Pascal or any other programming language as long as it works. The OP has taken on board much of the feedback that has been given and that is to be commended.

If you think that something isn't right, perhaps you could offer some positive feedback instead of raining on someone else's parade; a wee bit of respect wouldn't go amiss.

 

[riceuten]

I had to look up what "vibe-coded" meant and I'm still none the wiser. I'm not a programmer and I suspect that most of the people who would use StopBoard aren't either. I really don't care if it's written in BASIC, Turbo Pascal or any other programming language as long as it works. The OP has taken on board much of the feedback that has been given and that is to be commended.

"Vibe coding is a software development style where you build apps, websites, or tools by describing what you want in plain, natural language to an AI assistant. Instead of writing code line by line, you "vibe" with the model—guiding, testing, and iterating through conversational prompts while the AI handles the syntax, logic, and deployment"

If you think that something isn't right, perhaps you could offer some positive feedback instead of raining on someone else's parade; a wee bit of respect wouldn't go amiss.

I have - it doesn't work. Nothing has been done about it

 

[GusB]

"Vibe coding is a software development style where you build apps, websites, or tools by describing what you want in plain, natural language to an AI assistant. Instead of writing code line by line, you "vibe" with the model—guiding, testing, and iterating through conversational prompts while the AI handles the syntax, logic, and deployment"

In other words, it's utterly meaningless to most people and of zero importance to the end user.

I have - it doesn't work. Nothing has been done about it

I don't know what other commitments the OP has, but it's quite possible that they have other priorities. Your criticism is rather harsh.

 

[James H]

I'm generally an AI sceptic but I've vibe-coded myself a simple web app for my local bus stops (not using any APIs, just links to existing published resources, organised in a way that avoids many clicks and taps that would otherwise be needed to switch between different sources and stops, and incorporating basic geolocation).

I think it has the potential to be quite empowering when used to build niche tools to meet specific needs.

 

[aaronspence]

Probably going off topic but I have no issue with projects like this that are vibe coded when they are free but there’s a lot of situations where people vibe code apps then stick a monthly subscription charge on it to use, those are a problem as the market just gets flooded with money grabbing apps.

 

[SalopBuses]

I had to look up what "vibe-coded" meant and I'm still none the wiser. I'm not a programmer and I suspect that most of the people who would use StopBoard aren't either. I really don't care if it's written in BASIC, Turbo Pascal or any other programming language as long as it works. The OP has taken on board much of the feedback that has been given and that is to be commended.

If you think that something isn't right, perhaps you could offer some positive feedback instead of raining on someone else's parade; a wee bit of respect wouldn't go amiss.

I am anti generative AI and as someone who supports human made work and has studied the negative affects of generative AI and how it steals code, set, etc from real products by real people, I have zero respect for AI generated for products, I understand programming is difficult to learn but is NOT an excuse to use generative AI, I am not against AI for proper uses however such as healthcare, but generative AI is harmful and therefore I will have zero respect for it, I do however respect the idea behind the product and wish that the product as coded 100% by a human, also vibe coded software can pose security risks for users if the product has an account system with personal details of users and the owner/creator of the product, but this is a great idea but I won't be using it if there is an ounce of generative AI, I know it harsh, but it is how it is.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 14 Aug 2026 ==

I am anti generative AI and as someone who supports human made work and has studied the negative affects of generative AI and how it steals code, set, etc from real products by real people, I have zero respect for AI generated for products, I understand programming is difficult to learn but is NOT an excuse to use generative AI, I am not against AI for proper uses however such as healthcare, but generative AI is harmful and therefore I will have zero respect for it, I do however respect the idea behind the product and wish that the product as coded 100% by a human, also vibe coded software can pose security risks for users if the product has an account system with personal details of users and the owner/creator of the product, but this is a great idea but I won't be using it if there is an ounce of generative AI, I know it harsh, but it is how it is.

I know what I'm saying is harsh however I'm also saying it from a place of heart for human creations and if the OP learns to code the product instead of vibe coding, then the OP will learn new skills and learn to program, I also do the same with AI posters, if an event has an AI generated poster I will simply avoid the event, there are many others who will aswell.
So again this is a great concept, but I won't be using it due to it being vibe coded.

 

[GusB]

I am anti generative AI and as someone who supports human made work and has studied the negative affects of generative AI and how it steals code, set, etc from real products by real people, I have zero respect for AI generated for products, I understand programming is difficult to learn but is NOT an excuse to use generative AI, I am not against AI for proper uses however such as healthcare, but generative AI is harmful and therefore I will have zero respect for it, I do however respect the idea behind the product and wish that the product as coded 100% by a human, also vibe coded software can pose security risks for users if the product has an account system with personal details of users and the owner/creator of the product, but this is a great idea but I won't be using it if there is an ounce of generative AI, I know it harsh, but it is how it is.

Don't use it, then! Simples