When your bus has to wait to even out the gaps, what are the gaps? Ever waited ages for a bus, wondering where they’ve all gone? Most likely, they were terminated early somewhere further up the route - but where?

I track nearly 9000 London buses making 94,000 journeys every day, across 675 routes, day and night, in every corner of London, bottle them, and put them online for you to watch.

Finally, you can test whether the old saying, “you wait ages for a bus, then 3 turn up at once”, is true. If your bus terminates early, you can see what else was going on across the route that day, or if there are huge gaps with no buses turning up, you can see exactly where they all were. You’ll probably find they were being turned back early somewhere further up the route.

You can also follow where buses on diversion are going, and how long it takes them. Or if you just enjoy the hypnotic effect of watching all the little buses driving back and forth, I’ve got you covered - the route and day you select will loop indefinitely.

How it works

Choose a route from the drop down menu, pick a day, watch the buses go! I store the last 35 days of every route online, updated every morning around 6am with yesterday’s routes. If there’s a particular day you want to keep for posterity, you can save the data file locally and replay it whenever you like.

The colour of the day in the picker indicates days with more or fewer curtailments (early terminations) as this is both a common frustration in itself, and also an indication that something is going wrong, so there may be other problems on the route worth looking into.

Each bus leaves a coloured trail. There’s no significance to the colour, it helps you pick out an individual bus and follow its movement. The windows in the bus match its trail colour.

Tracking errors. Alas, I can’t track the buses with magic and fairy dust, instead every bus has a GPS device with a mobile phone connection that reports its position every 10 seconds. This is the same data TfL uses to tell you when the next bus is due. Sometimes the GPS position can be inaccurate so the bus might seem to wander, while some areas have poor phone signal stopping the bus sending its position back to the mothership for a while, so it skips forward when it regains contact. I do the best I can with the data I receive, so if a bus’s movement seems weird or implausible, it may just be erroneous tracking data.

Don’t forget to check the night bus routes as well.

If you spot any errors or have feedback or ideas for improvement, email me: London@NeilGarratt.com