Any idea why all the buses have disappeared?
Bus Open Data was having issues affecting tracking from TFL.
bustimes.org is acting a bit strange right now. When I go onto the site and click on an operator, some of the routes are just gone, even though they haven't changed operators or have been withdrawn or anything of that matter. Yorkshire Buses for example, you can see in the image below that a considerable number of the routes are just gone. Where's the 61/61A? Where is the 113? Can someone please explain what's going on here?
It's a bit of a thing that there are ongoing issues with West Yorkshire Metro and their uploads to Traveline. There's been a few of these style outages with them.
My local services look OK. Most issues are down to garbage input by the operators. Where I live in Bucks timetables are still showing for Red Eagle routes despite them losing the contract while the wrong stops are shown on two Carousel routes.
Both 'garbage' data from some operators and poor traveline updates from local authorities cause a number of issues.
Red Eagle has major issues with them just being extremely lazy with their open data and it's full of more holes than a sieve. Feedback on their data is just ignored and if you email them, you get blanked.
As for Carousel, if they are aware of the issues, they do mostly resolve them within a few weeks. Any which stand out?
Those services have disappeared from the Traveline National Dataset (and
https://www.traveline.info/) – this can happen sometimes, as does the opposite problem of cancelled services sticking around. Fortunately there are other sources of data such as the Bus Open Data Service, so they're back on bustimes.org now:
https://bustimes.org/operators/yorkshire-travel-group
The issue is, you are constantly battling between Traveline data and flawed open data. Especially with Yorkshire Buses for example, their open data is shocking and they blame everyone else for all of the issues and any issues which are within their control, they ignore you or block you (at one point they blamed West Yorkshire Metro for not providing transxchange files for them insert into their Ticketer portal. Rather than using Ticketer and creating their own files, they had to pass the blame. Somehow that also affected the completely separate setting which activated tracking.
In general, as has been said, the site is fully dependant on data provided to it by Traveline, the operators websites, operators open data or in limited cases, another source and so relies upon user reports to alert of issues. In most cases reports are made via a dedicated channel on the Discord server and issues are reported to the right people and slowly get resolved, or the data source is changed temporarily. Sadly though there are a few operators where there are issues which can't be resolved as the operator refuses to update open data despite extremely large issues, and local authorities no longer upload information to Traveline, and so the choice is extremely bad data, or no data.