Traveline:
Britain’s Multi-Modal Journey Planner
3 April 2022
When journey planners were in their infancy, about 20 years ago, my brother asked me what the point of them was. I therefore challenged him to plan a journey from the family home in West London to Crich Tramway Museum in Derbyshire, using the online tools available at the time. Those tools probably included the National Rail planner, but there were no local bus equivalents at that time.
To his credit, he stuck to the task. It took him an hour-and-a-quarter, and the final result wasn’t ideal, ending at Whatstandwell station, where you have an awkward one mile walk to Crich. I don’t think journey planners even now warn you that the innocent-looking “one mile walk” is going to be “up a steep hill, on a country lane, with no lighting or pavements”.
To be fair, it is very difficult to access Crich by bus. There are some local services but they’re infrequent. When I went in 2011, I needed the timetables for all three routes to hand so that I could target my return journey most effectively.
ABOVE: In May 2011, the service to Crich Tramway Village was provided by yourbus of Heanor, Derbyshire. Two of their vehicles are outside the Village entrance on Saturday 28th May 2011. There are various internet records for the bus on the left, PJ02 RHA, as recent as May 2020.
So here I am, twenty years on from that discussion with my brother, and journey planners are commonplace. But I was astounded to read a suggestion yesterday, from the MD of one of the largest train operating companies in Great Britain, that this country needs:
“… a multi-modal journey planner … where you type in any street corner and get a [journey] suggestion regardless of whether you are getting a train, a tram, a bus or a water taxi. It will give you options for the whole journey.”
This quote, which appeared in RAIL magazine issue 952, came from a respected industry figure, and was supported by another major industry figure, a leading executive of one of the biggest international transport operators in Europe, who said that:
“...we get challenged from people in the Netherlands, who ask why we don’t have a multi-modal journey planner.”
Well here’s news for those very senior rail figures. We do have a multi-modal journey planner. It’s been around for years. It’s called Traveline.
Traveline is “a partnership of transport companies, local authorities and passenger groups which have come together to bring … routes and times for all travel in Great Britain by bus, rail, coach and ferry”. And the best bit is – it offers exactly what is so desired by those industry leaders whom I have quoted above.
For the casual traveller from A to B, it is possible to put a postcode in and plan a journey to another postcode, or a town name, and a multi-modal journey will be returned. There is then a map which can be viewed at whatever level you desire – the whole journey or street level. The latter is ideal, of course, to help understand the local layout if there are several bus stops, for example.
Then, for any buses, go to the Timetables section and look at the full service, in case the suggested connection feels tight, or you want to allow time for a coffee. If you prefer, there is a link to the operator’s website.
I do a lot of my journey planning using Traveline. The timetable function gives me a good idea of what level of service I can expect on any given route. The timetable presentation is better than some operator websites (especially Arriva’s). And you can get a full timetable for a TfL service, something even TfL doesn’t provide. The print of the full route 207 timetable (Hayes By-Pass to White City), showing all times and all stops, runs to 84 pages!
OK, Traveline has its faults, like all journey planners. If two associated routes run with slightly different numbers (eg, 51 and 51A), it will only offer the timetable for the service you have asked for. So I might discover an hourly route 51 without finding out that it is actually a half-hourly joint 51 / 51A.
Sometimes an additional service like that can be inferred. If the plan brings up a 51A, I might conclude that there’s a 51 knocking around somewhere as well. And a 24-minute frequency on a service is usually a dead giveaway that a similarly-numbered service is providing a joint 12-minute frequency.
But not always. I remember finding a 40-minute frequency on a service last year, and wondering whether there was another route running an alternative 40-minute service to provide a combined 20-minute frequency. I never found it, because it didn’t exist. It turned out to be a half-hourly service that had been cut back due to Covid, to save a vehicle.
The timetable presentation on Traveline can be a bit clunky. When you seek a timetable, and whatever date you put into it, you are given the Weekday service in one direction as a default. You have to figure out that the “Timetable Controls” button is what you need to choose to see the other direction, and you need to switch from “Detailed” (all stops) to “Summary” (timing points) to get something easy to manage.
The presentation is especially challenging if there is a Bank Holiday during the week you are looking at, where the timetables for all days will be merged into one, with column headnotes to show that “service only runs Monday” or “service does not run Monday”:
But what Traveline does do, once you have worked out its little foibles, is to give accurate information, and it rarely lets me down.
I thought it had let me down when I arrived one Wednesday evening at Ormskirk Bus Station to catch the Arriva service 310 into Liverpool. Traveline had told me that the (last) bus would be at 1906, but the timetable in the stop said 1842 then 1922, with a 1906 service only on a Saturday. The bus turned up at 1906, and I subsequently learnt that Arriva was at that stage running a reduced, Saturday service on the route in question.
And there have been other occasions where the Traveline information has varied from what is stated in the bus stop. Invariably, Traveline has turned out to be the correct source of information.
So I thought I would put Traveline to the test this morning, in the interests of research. I planned a journey from an address in Ealing (a former family address although they have long since moved from there) to the main hospital in Portsmouth – the Queen Alexandra Hospital in Cosham – for next Saturday morning. The route generated sounds perfectly sensible:
I thought it had let me down when I arrived one Wednesday evening at Ormskirk Bus Station to catch the Arriva service 310 into Liverpool. Traveline had told me that the (last) bus would be at 1906, but the timetable in the stop said 1842 then 1922, with a 1906 service only on a Saturday. The bus turned up at 1906, and I subsequently learnt that Arriva was at that stage running a reduced, Saturday service on the route in question.
And there have been other occasions where the Traveline information has varied from what is stated in the bus stop. Invariably, Traveline has turned out to be the correct source of information.
So I thought I would put Traveline to the test this morning, in the interests of research. I planned a journey from an address in Ealing (a former family address although they have long since moved from there) to the main hospital in Portsmouth – the Queen Alexandra Hospital in Cosham – for next Saturday morning. The route generated sounds perfectly sensible:
This all comes with a map showing the whole route (although I have cut it from the above). This is easily replaced with a meaningful one showing a specific part of the journey as desired, such as how to get from Portsmouth & Southsea station to the bus stop. Again, the mapping seems fine to me:
So in this case, I have nine minutes to find the bus stop, but it will be after 11.30am and the map is also showing me a potential lunch stop (believe me, 11.30am is a perfectly reasonable time for me to consider lunch)! So perhaps I should check the timetable to see how often the buses run. I can go to the operator directly, using the links provided...
…or I can use the timetable facility on Traveline itself:
In this case, I can see that buses run every 20 minutes, so no problem if I miss the intended service or want to stop for lunch!
ABOVE: First Hampshire’s 63049, a Streetlight DF on route 7 in Commercial Road, Portsmouth, on Friday 22nd August 2014. Portsmouth & Southsea station is behind me. Route 7 no longer goes to South Parade Pier, which is in nearby Southsea.
Google does multi-modal planning, although I have never figured out how you set it to any departure time other than the present.
For proper multi-modal journey planning, there is Traveline. And it’s good! Time for a publicity campaign, maybe? Start with the industry leaders.