What the codes on a bus stop mean

Most bus stops in England carry more than one identifier. There is the name on the flag, a short code printed near it, and a longer code you rarely see in the street but which every timetable system uses behind the scenes. They do different jobs, and knowing which is which saves a lot of confusion when a stop name turns out to be ambiguous.

The stop name is not unique

Stop names are written for people standing next to them, not for computers. That means the same name appears in many places, and often twice within one town — once on each side of a road.

Across the areas this site currently covers there are 125,167 active bus stops, spread over 4,674 towns and villages. Duplicate names are not a rare edge case; they are normal. "Church Street", "The Green" and "Bus Station" all appear many times over.

This is why searching by name alone sometimes gives you several results that look the same. The distinguishing information is the locality and the direction, not the name.

The ATCO code is the real identity

Every stop has an ATCO code — a national reference under a scheme run for the whole of Great Britain. It looks like this:

4100015GHDNS

It is unique. No two stops share one. The first three digits identify the administrative area the stop sits in, which is why a code beginning 410 is in Tyne and Wear and one beginning 430 is in the West Midlands.

You will not usually see an ATCO code on the pole, but you will see it in the address bar when you open a stop page on this site. It sits at the end of the URL. That makes a stop page link precise: send someone the link and they get exactly the stop you meant, not one with a similar name.

The SMS code is the short one on the pole

The shorter code printed at the stop — often six or eight characters, sometimes labelled for text-message use — is a different identifier. Of the 125,167 stops we hold, 121,454 have one, so the large majority of stops carry one but not quite all.

Its usefulness is that it is short enough to read off a pole and type in. If you are standing at an unfamiliar stop and want to be certain you have the right one, that code is the quickest way to check you are looking at the right departures.

Why the direction matters more than you would expect

A pair of stops opposite each other usually share a name and sit metres apart, but they serve opposite directions. Boarding at the wrong one is one of the easiest mistakes to make in an unfamiliar town, and the stop name will not warn you.

Stop records carry a compass bearing — the direction a bus faces when it calls there. That is what makes it possible to tell an eastbound stop from a westbound one when both are called the same thing.

In practice, the reliable check is the destination shown against each departure. If the destinations are all places in the wrong direction, you are on the wrong side of the road.

Which one should you actually use?

• Finding a stop while standing at it — the short SMS code on the pole.
• Sending someone a precise link — the stop page URL, which contains the ATCO code.
• Searching from home — the stop name plus the town, then check the destinations to confirm the direction.

If you are somewhere unfamiliar and none of the codes are legible, nearby stops will find the stops around you and show what is departing from each.

Where these codes come from

Stop records, including names, codes, coordinates and bearings, come from the national stop database rather than from individual operators. That is why stop information is consistent between different bus websites while timetable information sometimes is not — they generally share the same stop source. You can see the full list of sources we use on the data sources page.