Every County Should Have One...
9 June 2024
ABOVE: Country Bus 322 (YJ11 EKG), an Optare Solo, departs from Newton Abbot's Sherborne Road Bus Interchange, on Devon route 174 from Teignmouth to Torbay Hospital. Beside it is Stagecoach South West 15927 (YN63 BWX), a Scania N230UD ADL Enviro400, which has just arrived from Exeter on route 2. It's Thursday 2 May 2024.
Today, I want to heap praise on a county council-provided bus planning tool that I found prior to a recent bus trip, and which transformed that trip.
One of the big challenges of planning my trips is to find out exactly what bus services are available. And the best place to start this is with some sort of Network Map.
There are some excellent tools available for this: Bus Atlas, for example, shows major routes for many parts of the country (a work in progress), in a series of straight-forward easy-to-read maps. Some areas of Stagecoach operations are blessed with detailed network maps, and the same applies to First. But these are patchy and some regions just show places served and not how the routes link between them.
Go-Ahead generally offers maps - I remember my joy at finding the Go North East complete network map when I was planning a trip up there a couple of years ago (curiously I can't find it now)...
Many smaller operators also offer network maps, if they have enough services to merit it being called a "network", but it's by no means universal. Arriva... Route maps, yes, once you know what route you're looking for, but I can't see anything that has two or more routes mapped out in the same place.
Two of the most notorious omissions are of course Transport for London and National Express West Midlands. Neither offers network maps. Both have journey planners, but that assumes that you want to go somewhere specific and not just to explore the area.
Where I can't find a specific resource, I resort to planning a journey on traveline, between two places that look, on Google Maps, like they should have a direct service. Sometimes I find what I'm after, sometimes I don't, and sometimes I discover a better option by accident because of the combination of routes being offered.
I also spend a lot of time on BusTimes.org, but I have only recently discovered that, if you select a town name, you can get a list of all the bus services that serve that town (such as Blackburn in this case):
Screenshot from BusTimes.org
...or a list of bus stops, showing all bus routes that serve them (this is my home town of Southall in West London):
Screenshot from BusTimes.org
...enabling me to look at the route timetables and consider what options are available.
And I can even choose a specific bus stop - from a list or from a timetable - to see what is available at that stop, in terms of both services and departures (the latter can be for immediately or for a future date and time). This example is for Lingfield Station in Surrey:
Screenshot from BusTimes.org
But, prior to my recent trip into Devon, I discovered Devon County Council's Interactive Public Transport map. This does exactly what is says on the tin. It's a complete map of the county's bus service network, regardless of operator.
Screenshot from Devon County Council's Interactive Bus Map
You can zoom into any area to get a feel for the bus services that are available:
Screenshot from Devon County Council's Interactive Bus Map
Routes are colour-coded to give you an idea of their frequency:
- Red and yellow shows routes with "approximately hourly or greater service";
- Red shows five journeys a day or more;
- Blue is one-to-four journeys a day;
- Green is "less than a daily service"; and
- Dotted lines represent summer-only services.
So from the map, I can immediately tell which services are most likely to be 'available' when I start my planning. On the sample above, there are plenty of opportunities to get to Clyst St Mary, south-east of Exeter, for example, but it looks less easy to get to Colebrooke or Yeoford (west and south-west of Crediton respectively) - although the map also helpfully shows that Yeoford has a railway station, on the Exeter to Barnstaple line.
So, from this information, I can start to sketch out a possible day trip. Now what about the actual timetables?
Very easy indeed; click on a route number, and the timetable comes up:
Screenshot from Devon County Council's Interactive Bus Map
Indeed, there is a full timetable database for every service in the county:
Screenshot from Devon County Council's Interactive Bus Map
And, just in case you think the detail gets lost in town and city centres, not a bit of it! There are 'inset' maps to ensure the level of detail is retained, such as this one for Exeter City Centre:
Screenshot from Devon County Council's Interactive Bus Map
Incidentally, if you're wondering what all those letters are that are dotted around the Exeter area, Exeter operates a number of routes with letters rather than numbers, from A up to U (although not every letter is in use).
These date back to the early days of deregulation, when a large network of lettered minibus services was introduced across the city. The services used dual-door minibuses which looked really odd and must have had a very low number of seats (see this photo by Geof Sheppard on Wikimedia). The surviving routes now have much larger buses, but with half the number of doors...
ABOVE: Stagecoach South West 36229 (WA60 HLY), an ADL Enviro200, is turning out of Cowick Street into Cowick Lane, on the western side of Exeter, on Tuesday 30 April 2024. It is working route A to the southern suburb of Alphington.
Back to the Interactive Map; when I first looked at the map, I was drawn to the Buses of Somerset route 25 from Taunton as an alternative way of getting into Devon, changing at Bampton to the 398 service to Tiverton:
Screenshot from Devon County Council's Interactive Bus Map
And that became the trip that I described a few articles ago, albeit going through to Dulverton, rather than stopping in Bampton, because a quick scan of the two timetables, via the Devon timetable database, showed that I would have a better connection that way.
At the time of my trip on the 25, I found myself wondering why a route that starts in Somerset and finishes in Somerset was showing on this Devon map. But a rescan of the map makes the answer obvious - the route passes into Devon and out again, so is a bona fide Devon bus service (this also explains why other services to Dulverton, such as the 198 to Minehead - exclusively Somerset - does not appear).
ABOVE: A quick check on the Devon Interactive Bus Map is all that is needed to confirm that route 75, pictured here, is a short-distance service from Bideford to the market town of Great Torrington. As well as a basically hourly weekday service, there's even a Sunday service of four buses a day in this relatively-remote corner of North Devon. On Friday 3 May 2024, Stagecoach South West 37134 (YY14 WGM), an ADL Enviro200, is parked at Bideford Quay prior to its next journey.
As you will have realised, I have been hugely impressed by the Devon Interactive Bus Map, and I didn't need any other tools to plan my travels across the county (many of those journeys have yet to be described in these pages). It's a superb online facility that will hopefully encourage bus travel across the county.
But why only Devon County Council? EVERY county should have one!