Found a wrong bus time? What to report and what happens next

Not everything that looks wrong on a bus website is an error, and the useful ones to report are quite specific. Knowing which is which saves you time and makes the reports we get far more actionable.

Things that look wrong but usually are not

A bus that did not arrive. This is normally a cancellation or a delay on the day, not a timetable error. The timetable said what the operator published; the bus simply did not run. Nothing on our side needs fixing. There is more on working out which situation you are in at what to do when your bus doesn't turn up.

No live time against a departure. Not every operator sends live positions, and not every vehicle reports reliably. A scheduled-only time is normal.

The same route number appearing in several places. Route numbers are local, not national, and are reused across the country. See why the same bus number exists in different towns.

A bus missing during the school holidays. Many journeys are timetabled to run only on school days. See why your bus doesn't run in the school holidays.

Your usual time moving by a minute or two. Operators adjust running times regularly, and it is a real change rather than a glitch. See how often bus timetables change.

Things genuinely worth reporting

• A service shown at a stop it does not serve, or missing from one it does.
• A stop in the wrong place on the map, or with the wrong name.
• A route shown as running when it has been withdrawn, particularly if it has been gone for a while.
• Times that consistently disagree with the printed timetable at the stop — not by a minute, but a genuine mismatch.
• The wrong operator shown against a route.
• A stop that shows nothing at all when buses clearly call there.

The common thread is that these are all persistent, not one-off events on the day.

What to include

The more specific the report, the faster it can be checked:

1. Which stop. The stop page link is ideal, because it identifies the stop exactly — stop names repeat heavily and there are usually two with the same name on opposite sides of a road.
2. Which route and direction, including the destination shown.
3. What you expected and what you saw, with times.
4. When — the date and roughly the time, and whether it happens every day or happened once.
5. What the timetable at the stop says, if you can see it.

Send it through the report a problem page.

What happens next, honestly

Reports fall into two groups, and the outcome is different for each.

Errors in how we read or present the data. These are ours to fix, and they are the ones where a report leads directly to a change. Examples: a stop appearing in the wrong place, a service not showing where it should, an operator labelled wrongly.

Errors in the published source data. Timetables are published by operators. If an operator's published data says a withdrawn service still runs, every site drawing on that source will show it, and the fix has to happen at source. We cannot correct an operator's timetable, and inventing a correction would make our data disagree with everyone else's for no verifiable reason.

What a report still achieves in the second case is important: it tells us the difference between the two. Quite often something that looks like bad source data turns out to be a bug at our end, and we would not know to look without the report.

If you need an answer about a specific journey

For a question about a particular bus on a particular day — a cancellation, a lost item, a complaint about a service — the operator is the right place, and the only one that can answer. Route pages name the operator running each service, and the operator list will help if you are not sure who that is.

If you want to know what we hold and where it comes from before reporting something, the data sources page sets that out.