Site Review: Live London Bus Map

Live London Bus Map

Live London Bus Map shows the London Bus routes onto an interactive map. It is developed by Matthew Somerville who developed the Live Tube Map in which he originally created.  It uses Open Street Map
an open source online map, unlike TFL in which they use Google Maps. But to start off with the map, its default route is 73 so I change it to route 25 for example. Route 25 is one of the heavily used bus routes in the entire London Buses network, it also have a highest Peak Vehicle requirement of 60 buses at day and 28 buses at night because it’s a 24 hour route.

The moving red dots indicate that is a bus in motion, It has a small arrow pointing towards their next bus stop. Which you click on the red dot, it reveals the registration of the bus, but it doesn't show its fleet number unlike London Vehicle Finder does. But it’s ideal to know where the buses are but they do not indicate the actual GPS location of the bus so it relies on the next bus feeds. But the information when you click on the red dot tells you how long till the bus arrives at the next stop.

The yellow dot is the bus stops, you move your cursor over the yellow dot and it gives you the bus stop name, but it does not give you the countdown to show when the next bus arrives.

I think it needs a route diagram to show where the bus is going on the map, but it would cause confusion without the diagram when there are diversions in place for the bus route. But I think the new TFL site should feature this on its maps. I will also be reviewing the Live Tube Map in the coming days.

Site URL: http://traintimes.org.uk/map/london-buses/
The route default is 73 you can change it easily by adding ‘#’ and a route number like ‘24’ at the end of the URL. It will also work on your smartphones depending on the browser and the phone.

Screenshots is used for presentational purposes.