I'm a bit confused what the issue is finding it. From the timetable page you just select the line, then stops and then time of day. It definitely isnt perfect, there are a lot of issues with the Northern Line on it, but for the OP's purposes it is pretty simple, and of course the journey planner makes that even simpler, you just have to put the start and finish and see both journey times at once.
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Why is TfL's web site rubbish
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As many as 5 buses a day. There are places that only have one bus on the market day once a week. But at least the fare is capped at £2.
I don't disagree with what you've written. In the opening post the OP asked for the journey time between the two stations, hopefully he can make his choices now.
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See my reply to Craig 1122, I didn't know to put it into one message but this I hope will be Mercedes.
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Merged
Thanks for that. That was only part of the reason for checking. I had been on a travel web site and a visitor was asking about getting from Paddington to Lambeth North. The person had limited abilities, mainly vision impairment. Some people suggested taxi from Paddington to the hotel near Lambeth North rather than taking the Bakerloo. I suggested making a level change at Baker Street the taking the Jubilee that is step free at Waterloo. Then if necessary a taxi from Waterloo. Just like here there were howls of abuse for suggesting the alternative. Of course another reason for not using the Bakerloo at Waterloo, especially for somebody with impaired vision is the sodding great gap between the train and platform at Waterloo. I bet the journey planner doesn't tell you about that.
If they are going to Lambeth North and will tolerate the Bakerloo Line as well as inaccessible stations like Paddington Bakerloo or Circle/H+C (which does not have step free access!) why are you suggesting this roundabout route? The Bakerloo runs from Paddington to Lambeth North directly.
As already posted, if they need step free access throughout, Elizabeth Line to Bond Street and Jubilee to Waterloo (and then a short walk) is a much easier way for someone with these impairments to make the trip.
Journey planners won't suggest the interchange at the Bakerloo at Waterloo if you ask for step free access. There are solutions to these issues already out there.
What didn't you understand, they have a disability with vision. Who said they tolerate the Bakerloo. They are flying into Heathrow and looked at the map and saw Bakerloo goes from Paddington to Lambeth North. I gather Paddington Bakerloo is step free, is that not the case? Bakerloo-Jubilee-Waterloo is a roundabout route? Good point didn't think of Elizabeth line to Bond Street especially if they are coming from Heathrow. "
Please translate into English.
You have said
"They have chosen to go by Bakerloo Line." in the opening post. Perhaps they were not aware it is not fully accessible?
No; it's step free only from street to platform, and like every other Bakerloo line interchange one must navigate a step, sometimes a significant one, to actually board the train at the platform.
If they're flying into Heathrow and visually impaired then they're better off getting the Elizabeth Line (level boarding) directly from there to Bond Street and cutting out the Paddington faff.
You can demand that a journey planner suggests only step free routes so they will be fully inclusive of someone who needs or prefers this. If you do ask for a step free route it would never suggest the Bakerloo line at all, because none of them have step free access from platform to train. As you say, a step is required to get onto the train, and yes, a journey planner will know this and won't suggest the route if you just tell it you need a step free route. Google Maps, TfL's own journey planner, Citymapper etc all have functions to do this.
Sadly for normal passengers, the prevailing attitude in London inevitably bleeds out to the regions, as if it is somehow best practice.
That's why it's really quite hard now to get past the stupid myriad of bespoke journey planners and other assorted "easy" to "use" tools in both operator and authority websites or apps, and access an actual timetable, much less a route or network map.
They seem to think all users of their so called service, are witless children.
So while they carry on wasting taxpayers or customers money maintaining such things, most people are by now surely using the far superior alternatives, such as bustimes.org.
Does Tfl even publish page views / user sessions for its journey planners? I doubt it. It probably doesn't even occur to them that people wouldn't find their tools useful, and in ever increasing numbers.
That's why it's really quite hard now to get past the stupid myriad of bespoke journey planners and other assorted "easy" to "use" tools in both operator and authority websites or apps, and access an actual timetable, much less a route or network map.
They seem to think all users of their so called service, are witless children.
So while they carry on wasting taxpayers or customers money maintaining such things, most people are by now surely using the far superior alternatives, such as bustimes.org.
Does Tfl even publish page views / user sessions for its journey planners? I doubt it. It probably doesn't even occur to them that people wouldn't find their tools useful, and in ever increasing numbers.
This is a fairly sweeping statement. I would argue that TfL are actually appealing to the vast majority of travellers who have no interest in trying to 'plan' a journey using perhaps 3 different timetables (depending on route of course).
This forum represents a unique microcosm of society who enjoy the minutiae of trip planning. Most people simply want to put a start and end, and have a route planner do the donkey work. I make no judgement about that, we live in a modern age and it's nice to have to tools to take the work out of a task.
Given that TfL also make the WTT available, I don't really see the issue. There is an argument to be made that the information could be better provided, but on the whole, it is there.
100% agree with this. The suggestion that most users use bustimes is ridiculous. Outside of friends from communities such as these, no one I know uses it, they use TfL Go, Citymapper or Google Maps. Even I don’t use bustimes.
There isn’t even just the WTT. TfL have a page that will show you all the departures in an hour on a route if a line. For anyone who wants to go deeper than Google etc it’s a very accessible alternative to the WTT. It is broken in a few cases but when I’ve reported that in the past they’ve fixed it in a fairly reasonable timeframe. Is it the prettiest thing? No, but is fixing something I’m sure has very low usage a good use of limited money? Also no.
It says so much that it was automatically assumed I only use bustimes.org because I'm a transport nerd out on jollies. Or that I do not know normal people, much less routinely assist strangers and confused relatives young and old, for whom bespoke planners are utterly useless, for assorted reasons.
Every single person I have shown bustimes.org, is an instant convert. It is a game changer. It reveals at a stroke, the money, time and effort wasted on our behalf by both private and public bodies, on far less useful but expensively procured tools.
That the wider public aren't using it in great numbers to both demystify and truthify bus travel, is surely only because they are indeed entirely unaware that it exists. And no doubt, the authorities and operators, and their expensive consultants, programmers and infrastructure providers, would like that to remain the case. Especially in London.
Every single person I have shown bustimes.org, is an instant convert. It is a game changer. It reveals at a stroke, the money, time and effort wasted on our behalf by both private and public bodies, on far less useful but expensively procured tools.
That the wider public aren't using it in great numbers to both demystify and truthify bus travel, is surely only because they are indeed entirely unaware that it exists. And no doubt, the authorities and operators, and their expensive consultants, programmers and infrastructure providers, would like that to remain the case. Especially in London.
It wasn't assumed only because, but it was assumed that part of the reason is you are on this forum. Bustimes is absolutely useful, especially on a route you do often with few alternatives. However to people who are going somewhere different usual, to tourists and visitors to London it is as much use as a chocolate teapot. Could you look at bustimes and tell me how to get from South Woodford to Ilford? (Random example, if you're familiar with it just choose some other random places). The answer is no, whereas I can open TfL Go and in 5 seconds it'll tell me to take the SL2 from stop Q, how to get to that stop, that there is a bus in 11 minutes and 22 minutes, show me on a map where those buses are, and give me an ETA at my destination. To be honest I'm a bit confused which feature you think TfL Go or Google Maps is missing that your average traveller needs?
Even for people who use a route often it is useful because it can suggest quicker alternatives, which there often can be in London, rather that just sitting watching bustimes tell you your bus is miles away.
The only thing that TfL's offering misses really is frequencies when travelling in advance, however they are fairly widely available on their website.
Mainly because despite some issues (mainly related to the workload challenge of manual inputting) real-time train passenger information (e.g. CIS/PIS) is generally leagues above real-time bus passenger information.
Not to mention there being an entire page of PDFs of the first and last trains on each line, and the previously linked timetable page having the ability to show you the first and last train between two points of your choosing with just a dropdown selection.
I agree - and you can't buy a ticket on it.
Where did your confidence in that answer even come from? Not from normal people like me. I've literally used it to plan journeys as a tourist.
I'll start by first pointing out your example is quite absurd. Presumably because you approached it from the perspective of how best to show the function of a planner, rather than how real people plan a journey.
Real people don't want to go from one vague place to another vague place, with apparently no preferences for their start or end point, but wanting to travel immediately.
Normal bus travellers, tourists included, have different needs, and so would use bustimes.org differently than how you framed it. But I'll address that below. First I'll show how useful bustimes.org is even for an absurd query like that....
First, you enter "South Woodford" into the search box. You select South Woodford, the place. Quite easy, there being only one result under "Places", since bustimes.org already knows the difference between settlement names, and say, stops and stations that merely include the name. A weakness of some planners, as seen in another thread.
It then gives you a list of only 12 bus and train services serving that place, which even the least familiar person can whittle down to only 7 relevant bus services just by eye, excluding schools and night buses. And that same eye (or CTRL F) can easily determine which of those actually call at Ilford.
There are precisely two bus services, SL2 and the 179, runing between "South Woodford" and "Ilford".
So already, in no time at all, easily under a minute, and with absolutely no need to consult TfL or even have any geographic knowledge of London at all, you have narrowed down the travel options from a million, to just two bus services.
Doss the TfL planner even let anyone do that? If not, why not?
And so, as anyone who uses it knows, once you have a route number on bustimes.org, you are mere seconds away from accessing its timetable, a route map showing every single stop, and live departure times at any of those stops. Total flexibiliy.
So even in this artificially vague request where the traveller apparently didn't care where in "South Woodford" or "Ilford" they are going to/from, they can now see which of the SL2 or 179 meets their needs, even if all they want to know is which bus is leaving the soonest, when, and how long it will take to get to the destination.
All the functions of the planner, as you describe it. Just without the hassle of the planner. The same tool, for any city, town or county.
So, now let's address how a real person plans a journey, and thus how bustimes.org can be immensely useful, over and above any planner.
Normal people wanting to go from South Woodford to Ilford by bus would already know their precise origin and destination. Typically one end would be a residential street, the other an amenity. So in all likelihood, a two bus journey, in this scenario hopefully a local bus connecting with the SuperLoop.
Using bustimes.org, the traveller doesn't even need to enter the place name, they simply fire up the map and find their origin and destination. They're aiming to locate the nearest bus stops, and since that's basically all that bustimes is for, well designed for the purpose, unlike many planners, that's very easy to do. Seconds.
Then you just click the two bus stops, and it lists the services that call there. So in all likelihood, even in London, certainly at the residential end, it's not a lot of routes. And most likely, even in London, you won't get lucky and find a bus calling at both stops. But where that does happen, it's very obvious in bustimes.org. Instant route map, timetable and live tracking.
But for the typically unlucky, all you then do is click the two stops and either look at their basic destination list, or their map, to see if they intersect.
If none do, well, that's probably when most people choose a different option entirely. Finding a three route bus combination is as hard to do in a planner as it is in bustimes.org (but at least in bustimes.org you can keep all your research open and reviewable).
For a simple two bus journey however, it's way easier. This sounds hard when rendered in abstract, but if you'd given a real example, say a specific street in suburban Iflord and a specific amenity in South Woodford, it becomes so obvious how easily the task lends itself to the human brain and the human eyeball with just a few clicks on a smartphone.
We are built for this. We are especially good at rapidly processing, say, two bus route maps in two different tabs, to find where they intersect.
Try it with these two route maps.....
275 - Walthamstow Central - Highams Park - Woodford Station - Tomswood Hill - Barkingside
Stagecoach London
W14 - Whipps Cross - Nightingale Lane - South Woodford - Roding Valley - Loughton
Stagecoach London
It's that easy. These two very different bus routes serving the same broad region of London, overlap at only a few stops near the north circular / M11 junction. You found them in seconds, armed only with a route number for each. No knowledge of London or its buses required.
Can the TfL planner answer queries like that? If not, why not?
Planners just don't allow that sort of query, because they patronisingly assume you're not capable of this level of analaysis of the TfL bus network.
But this is the simplicity of bustimes.org. The name is on the tin.
Anyone now armed with the two routes they need, where they intersect, with timetables and maps to hand, who still cannot figure out, for any specific departure time, what their itinery would be, and any walking time needed, probably shouldn't be travelling by bus anyway.
Planners even rather arrogantly hide from you in their chosen itineries, rather common details of bus networks, like circular routes, or routes with one way sections, or parts only served at certain times. Bustimes.org. make all these things pretty easy to see, and thus where you might be able to make better choices, up to and including picking departure times or connections you may have thought were not feasible from the limited insight offered by a planner's results for a specific window of time.
Planners can do the basics though, some (but not nearly all) even have map capabilites that are almost as good as bustimes.org. But given their basic assumptions about what you can and cannot do, will you ever really know if, say, it has chosen not to show you a specific route combination because some unseen parameter says the connection isn't feasible.
Bustimes.org is so flexible, so intuitive, in cases where you don't have an easy transfer between two buses at a common stop, you can still quite easily see if your journey can be completed with a moderately easy, say, 20 minute, walk. No parameters need setting or resetting.
Bustimes.org keeps it simple. A bus should (or will) be at a specific location at a specific time. If you need more than that level of detail to plan a bus journey, like I said, buses probably aren't for you anyway.
Since bustimes.org focuses on what people need to know, you can even use it to watch your proposed journey in real time, but say, 24 hours beforehand. That way you can tell if it actually runs to time or not. I used that specific function once to rule out using a once a day bus for a tight early morning connection.
You can only do that on a planner if it also has the functions of bustimes.org, but they rarely do. And where they do, why bother, when you can just use bustimes.org?
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I use bustimes.org to plan the route, then the company app to buy the ticket.
It's worked out as a far less stressful and annoying process for both Stagecoach and Arriva so far. No doubt the same would be true for other groups, because they all seem to use the same programmers and consultants.
With bustimes.org, I don't even have to care who the operators are at the planning stage, but it does then help me decide whether single or multi-operator ickets will be the better option. Up to and including whether unexpected changes in itinery might involve different company's buses.
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I would argue my example is not absurd. The reason I gave that example is it is the two places I needed to get between when I was in London 3 days ago when at house viewings. I'm not really sure why you're calling such a 'query', getting between two places in London which are not fare apart, so 'absurd', or being so hostile about it. I'll ignore the rest of the patronising remarks. I would argue a vague location lends itself to bustimes.
So searching for and going into two separate pages to whittle down bus routes? Yes it's possible but that isn't my point, TfL, Google etc can tell you the exact same info in seconds, and instantly remove routes that aren't running at your time of day. The 123 also runs between South Woodford and Ilford, perhaps helping show the issues with bustimes.
A journey planner would give you a list of possible routes, yes.
What hassle? Just fire up Google Maps, works anywhere, it will found a list of potential routes in 5 seconds. I simply cannot see this 'hassle' you refer to.
And they'd just enter that into the journey planner? You can even just press on your destination on the map on Google and get directions.
Sure you can do this, but I am just baffled how you think it is easier than asking a journey planner. The best route for most people isn't at the closest bus stops, and in London there are multiple options for many routes. Are you seriously suggesting that goring round a bunch of stops at your origin and destination is easy and quick? And if that doesnt work opening every route and seeing if any intersect?
Quite literally yes. I can enter a query of any address or even business name and it'll plot me a route there, or enter that for the origin and destination and change the time. You haven't given a single example of something it couldn't do in about 5 seconds.
No they don't let you see every bus in London, because to be frank most people dont care. They have somewhere they want to be, and a time they want to leave or arrive. They put that in a journey planner and they get a list of the best options, based on time and simplicity in seconds. You cant seriously think the majority people would prefer to spend 15 minutes analysing bustimes every time they want to go somewhere?
The same timetable that journey planners use?
It's not a matter of can't, its that by the time I could've spend half my evening planning my bus journey the next day I've decided to use the car. It shouldn't require that much research to get between two places.
Most people want buses to be simple and easy. They want to get given a route that is going to work and for it to work. That there might have been a route that was 2 minutes quicker with 2 more changes is irrelevant. When I have looked in more detail, because that kind of thing does interest me, I have rarely found a better route than the journey planners. Bustimes does have its uses, checking previous running like you mentioned is one, but for the majority of people who just want to get where they are going and not worry about it, it cannot replace a journey planner.
Bustimes is a great website but it is tailored for the power user rather than "normals". I use it to see GPS placement of buses (brilliant) and their registrations (so I can see what's turning up) but this is usually after I've used Google Maps or something to suggest a route and time. The GPS confirms timeliness and I just wait for the bus to come.
"Not from normal people like me" is such a breathtaking assertion to see someone insist on a dedicated transit forum. We can all search your posts to see if you have any scale models of buses or opinions on three axle buses!
I have to say I have shown many people Bustimes but none other than the most hardened transit user or bus enthusiast has seemed bothered.
Most people use Google Maps or a similar tool to get them from their GPS location to the address they want to go. That is just how most people now navigate the world. Perhaps it is a generational thing but looking up bus stops etc is just what I would politely call legacy thinking from people who are less technologically savvy. If you're having to ask if a journey planner would offer more than one appropriate bus route I'm not sure if you're best placed to be insisting it is a better place to plan your trips than Bustimes.
Google Maps is boring but very effective. It'll tell me there's a bus coming now but there's a 9 minute walk at the end to get to the museum I'm visiting, or I can wait five minutes and take a slightly longer route but that route drops me at the front door. Not everyone is going to be a fan and that's okay, but the app has billions of users worldwide for a reason, and Bustimes remains a highly valued but niche resource for many of us here for a reason.
"Not from normal people like me" is such a breathtaking assertion to see someone insist on a dedicated transit forum. We can all search your posts to see if you have any scale models of buses or opinions on three axle buses!
I have to say I have shown many people Bustimes but none other than the most hardened transit user or bus enthusiast has seemed bothered.
Most people use Google Maps or a similar tool to get them from their GPS location to the address they want to go. That is just how most people now navigate the world. Perhaps it is a generational thing but looking up bus stops etc is just what I would politely call legacy thinking from people who are less technologically savvy. If you're having to ask if a journey planner would offer more than one appropriate bus route I'm not sure if you're best placed to be insisting it is a better place to plan your trips than Bustimes.
Google Maps is boring but very effective. It'll tell me there's a bus coming now but there's a 9 minute walk at the end to get to the museum I'm visiting, or I can wait five minutes and take a slightly longer route but that route drops me at the front door. Not everyone is going to be a fan and that's okay, but the app has billions of users worldwide for a reason, and Bustimes remains a highly valued but niche resource for many of us here for a reason.
I think both of you neither have a true understanding of the features of bustimes.org (most of the queries I posed of planners by comparison, weren't even understood it seems), and you also have a deeply simplistic outlook to journey planning. Which is what the promoters of planners want.
It's already an incredibly complex task when even reduced to a start/end point and departure time. So why bother delving into matters that, while important to real people making real journeys, people like yourselves are totally incurious about?
Matters like where do the London bus routes 275 and W14 share stops, are pretty important to real people making real journeys. They are natural queries that arise, and whose answers carry great significance.
Unsurprisingly, the Google Map option, while able to answer such a query, pales in comparison to how one divines that answer via bustimes.org. As a human being with eyeballs and a brain. The reasons are obvious, and come down simply to what those respective sites exist to do.
The key point being here, I never really had an issue with Google per se (bar the broad concerns everyone should have - the latest being their AI can give a passably correct yet totally vague answer to the query, for reasons not too hard to fathom), my issue is about bespoke planners, especially publicly funded ones.
AFAIK they cannot even answer such a question, and your inability to even understand the question, shows that neither of you really have a good grasp on the true benefits of using bustimes.org as a planner to an ordinary traveller with everyday needs.
And as much as you want to deny it, I am quite sure I can tell when I am in normal person mode, as opposed to transport nerd mode. Unsurprisingly, I am at my most normal, when my journey is for a normal purpose.
It's already an incredibly complex task when even reduced to a start/end point and departure time. So why bother delving into matters that, while important to real people making real journeys, people like yourselves are totally incurious about?
Matters like where do the London bus routes 275 and W14 share stops, are pretty important to real people making real journeys. They are natural queries that arise, and whose answers carry great significance.
Unsurprisingly, the Google Map option, while able to answer such a query, pales in comparison to how one divines that answer via bustimes.org. As a human being with eyeballs and a brain. The reasons are obvious, and come down simply to what those respective sites exist to do.
The key point being here, I never really had an issue with Google per se (bar the broad concerns everyone should have - the latest being their AI can give a passably correct yet totally vague answer to the query, for reasons not too hard to fathom), my issue is about bespoke planners, especially publicly funded ones.
AFAIK they cannot even answer such a question, and your inability to even understand the question, shows that neither of you really have a good grasp on the true benefits of using bustimes.org as a planner to an ordinary traveller with everyday needs.
And as much as you want to deny it, I am quite sure I can tell when I am in normal person mode, as opposed to transport nerd mode. Unsurprisingly, I am at my most normal, when my journey is for a normal purpose.
No one is denying that bustimes can give more information, or that planners filter journeys down. However the vast majority of people do not want to spend their time sifting through random bus routes to find one. They want a planner to give them a route that is simple and fast.
You haven’t actually said what these higher matters are? I certainly wouldn’t call myself incurious, and would suggest I probably already spend longer planning routes than the average person.
What question exactly is that? You don’t seem to ever specify it.
It is a fairly basic task of a public transport operator to provide the ability to check how to use their services. I would argue the TfL one is not bad, but I agree there are absolutely dire ones.
So you think people want to make planning their journeys take significantly longer and be more difficult so that they can save a tiny amount of time travelling in a few instances?
No, it's what most people want and it's why TfL and many other journey planners aimed at the general population set up their planners in this way. Just to give options, where possible, for people to get from A to B. Implying that the tail is wagging the dog, as if most people don't have any agency, is just to dismiss the normal transport user we are discussing.
No, they're not important in and of themselves to most users. You find this out when using a journey planner anyway. If I want to go from A to B and I need two buses which change at C, Google Maps will tell me which stops to use and whether they're the stop at C is the same stop - or whether I need to cross the road or walk two minutes. This is helpful because if provides choice when multiple options are presented. Would I like to walk two minutes around the corner, or maybe I can take a direct bus with no walking. Bustimes will not do that for you, you will need to work it out yourself which takes longer.
Just claiming that people don't understand the question (along with implying we aren't thinking about "real people" or "real journeys") is not a way of advancing your opinion. You have very strong opinions but don't seem to be able to articulate exactly what the "question" is. I don't think you can really call anyone on this forum "incurious" about journey planning with a straight face!
I'm afraid that large journey planners will always be a more popular way of planning trips for most people because it suits their need of getting a fast and intuitive answer without spending time manually working things out like how far one will need to walk between stop CJ and stop CA, or even what the name of the stop is outside the barber shop you need to visit etc etc. Bustimes is not a journey planning tool marketed at the average user, and for good reason. It's clunky and while it is rich with information (the same information as public journey planners have!) it takes more time and knowledge for someone to navigate. It's a power user site, and very useful it is too...for that purpose.
I plan a lot of my overseas trips using complex software like ITA Matrix. This is extremely powerful and a power user knows shortcodes like AIRCRAFT T:318 or MINCONNECT 180. This is by far the best journey and fare finding tool still on the market. But it isn't something most people will use to plan their flights. That's fine. It doesn't make me a boffin for knowing how to use it quickly and it doesn't mean people who take a look and say "nah" are somehow subject only to the whims of big tech firms, blinded by ignorance. And if you said to me "well look that's very good but most people use Skyscanner or Google Flights because those are tools more attuned to their needs", you'd be right!
I am sorry to break it to you but nobody who chooses to post their opinions on a transit board is a normal transit user. Nobody here is a "normal". We are all atypical of the general population when it comes to our preferences for all sorts of things, and none of us really represent the average audience for journey planners.
The answer as to why most journey planners function in the way they do, and not like Bustimes, is because that is how they satisfy the needs of most of their users. Contrary to your typically bombastic assertions upthread, no, most people are not using Bustimes. It gets a not-insignificant 900k hits a month, but that accounts for all queries, not unique users. Even I go to it a couple dozen times a month!
There were many different questions, but we've narrowed it down to this for now....(merely as an example)
Routes 275 and W14 share three sequential stops on a 1.5km stretch of route, in both directions. Which one should you change at?
Which one of those stops you choose, can be very important for normal travellers. If you don't know the many reasons why they might choose one over another, perhaps you have no idea what the shortcomings of planners are for most people? It can be everything from basic to complex needs. Everyone is different, even the normal people.
The key here, is planners, including Google Maps, not only won't tell you there's three options there, they'll simply pick one essentially at random, or on some mathematical basis. A programmer's solution to a subjective problem.
Google's AI is even worse, merely saying you can make this change somewhere near Woodford station. An answer it arrives at only because there is a planner out there with a place page for Woodford station listing both routes as serving it.
This is what you're not seeing. This sort of difference would matter to most people planning a bus journey, if they had even the first clue there was an alternative out there.
The dominance of Google and the power of public authorities and large operators to push what they have coded, ensures websites like bustimes.org, never enter the public consciousness.
Routes 275 and W14 share three sequential stops on a 1.5km stretch of route, in both directions. Which one should you change at?
Which one of those stops you choose, can be very important for normal travellers. If you don't know the many reasons why they might choose one over another, perhaps you have no idea what the shortcomings of planners are for most people? It can be everything from basic to complex needs. Everyone is different, even the normal people.
The key here, is planners, including Google Maps, not only won't tell you there's three options there, they'll simply pick one essentially at random, or on some mathematical basis. A programmer's solution to a subjective problem.
Google's AI is even worse, merely saying you can make this change somewhere near Woodford station. An answer it arrives at only because there is a planner out there with a place page for Woodford station listing both routes as serving it.
This is what you're not seeing. This sort of difference would matter to most people planning a bus journey, if they had even the first clue there was an alternative out there.
The dominance of Google and the power of public authorities and large operators to push what they have coded, ensures websites like bustimes.org, never enter the public consciousness.
Whichever one the journey planner suggests, to be honest.
Why don't you tell us what factors they are and how something like Bustimes assists with that?
Most people are not going to care about endlessly finessing a bus journey, I feel. They are perfectly happy just taking the route offered by a journey planner.