What to do when your bus doesn't turn up

Standing at a stop past your bus time is frustrating mainly because you don't know which problem you have. A bus running six minutes late needs patience. A cancelled one needs a new plan. The two look identical from the kerb, so the first job is telling them apart.

First, check whether the bus is being tracked

Open the stop page and look at the departure you are waiting for. If the time is shown as a live expected time, the bus exists, is on the road, and that time is worked out from where it actually is. In that case it is late rather than missing, and the expected time tells you how late.

If the time is still the plain scheduled one, nothing is reporting a position for that journey. That does not mean the bus is cancelled. It usually means one of three things:

• the operator does not send live positions for that service
• the bus has not started its journey yet
• the equipment on that particular vehicle is not reporting at the moment

Not every operator sends live data, and not every vehicle within an operator's fleet reports reliably. A scheduled-only time is normal, particularly on smaller operators and rural services.

Check for a published disruption

Operators publish disruptions separately from their timetables — roadworks, diversions, suspended services. These appear on service updates. If your route is listed there you have your answer, and the entry will usually say how long it applies for.

This is worth checking before you give up on a stop, because a diversion often means the bus is still running but not calling where you are standing.

Work out whether you have already missed it

This is the awkward one. A bus that ran slightly early and has gone looks exactly like a bus that has not arrived.

Two things help:

• The scheduled time is a departure time, not an arrival time. The operator's timetable says when the bus should leave that stop.
• If the next journey on the same route is showing a live expected time while the one you wanted has dropped off the board, the earlier journey has most likely already called.

Decide what to do next

If it is tracked and late — you can see the expected time, so you can judge whether waiting is worth it. That time updates while the page is open.

If there is a published disruption — check whether the route is diverted rather than cancelled. A diverted bus may be a short walk away on another road.

If nothing is tracked and no disruption is listed — look at the other routes serving your stop, and at stops nearby. The nearby stops page shows what is departing from stops around you, which is the quickest way to find an alternative you had not thought of. A different route number often covers part of the same corridor.

If you need certainty — contact the operator. Every route on this site names the company running it, so start from the operator list if you are not sure who that is. Operators know about cancellations that never reach a public feed, such as a driver being off sick that morning.

If the times here look wrong

We publish what operators publish. If a stop shows a service that clearly no longer runs, or times that do not match the timetable on the pole, please tell us using the report a problem page. Timetable data comes from the operator, so a genuine error usually has to be corrected at source — but knowing about it lets us check whether the fault is in the published data or in how we are reading it.

Why this happens at all

Timetables and live vehicle positions are two separate systems. A timetable can be perfectly accurate while the live feed stays silent, and the live feed can be working while the timetable is out of date. Knowing which one you are looking at is most of the battle at the stop.

For more on that difference, see what "live" means on a bus timetable.