Planning a journey that needs two buses

A single bus journey either works or it does not. A journey with a change has a weak point in the middle, and most journeys that go wrong go wrong there. The planning is different as a result: you are not looking for the fastest connection, you are looking for one that still works when the first bus is late.

Work backwards from when you need to arrive

Start at the end. Find the arrival you need, then the second leg that delivers it, then the first leg that gets you to the change in time. Planning forwards from home tends to produce a tight connection you then have to live with.

Choose the interchange before the times

Where you change matters more than when. A good change point has three properties:

• More than one option on the second leg. If several routes cover the second part of your journey, a missed connection costs you minutes rather than the whole plan.
• A short, obvious walk between stops — ideally the same stop or one across the road, not a ten-minute walk through a town centre.
• Somewhere tolerable to wait, particularly in the evening or in winter.

A bus station usually wins on all three, which is why it is often worth a slightly longer overall journey to change at one rather than at a roadside stop.

Give the connection real slack

The temptation is to take the tightest connection because it looks fastest on paper. In practice a five-minute connection is not a connection; it is a coin toss.

Ask a specific question instead: if the first bus is ten minutes late, what happens? If the answer is a short wait for the next one on the second leg, the plan is sound. If the answer is an hour's wait or no bus at all, build in more slack from the start, even if it means leaving earlier.

The right amount of slack depends on how often the second leg runs. Frequent second leg, a small buffer is fine. Second leg every hour, leave a lot more.

Check both legs on the day you are travelling

Both legs need checking against the actual day and time. This is where connections quietly break:

• Evening and Sunday services are thinner, and the second leg often stops running earlier than the first.
• School-day journeys disappear in the holidays, which can remove one side of an otherwise reliable connection. See why your bus doesn't run in the school holidays.
• Bank holidays reduce both legs, usually by different amounts.

On the day: use the live times

Once you are travelling, live tracking is most valuable on the first leg, because it tells you early whether the connection is still on.

If the first bus is showing as late and the delay is bigger than your buffer, you usually have options while still on board — a different second leg, a different change point, or getting off earlier where more routes run. Deciding at the interchange, after you have missed it, leaves fewer.

There is more on how those times are produced in how live bus tracking actually works.

Before you set off

• Both legs checked for the correct day and time
• The interchange stop confirmed for each leg, and the walk between them known
• The answer to "what if the first bus is ten minutes late"
• Service updates checked — a diversion at the interchange is the one that hurts most

Finding the routes

Start from the town pages to see what serves each end of your journey — the town list covers everywhere we hold data for — then open the specific stops to confirm times and directions. If you are unsure which stop to use at either end, nearby stops will show you what departs from the stops around a location.