Saving the bus stops you use every day
How saved stops work, where they are kept, and when they disappear.
Most people use the same two or three stops over and over — the one at the end of the road, the one outside work, the one they come home from. Searching for them each time is a small daily annoyance that is easy to remove.
How saving a stop works here
On any stop page there is an option to save that stop. Saved stops are then a click away next time, rather than something to search for.
There is deliberately no account and no sign-in. Nothing to register for, no password, no email address.
Where saved stops are kept
They are stored by your own browser, on the device you saved them on. They do not go to us and we do not hold a list of them.
That has some consequences worth knowing:
- They are per-device. Stops saved on your phone will not appear on your laptop, and the other way round.
- They are per-browser. Saving in one browser and opening the site in another means starting again.
- They will not survive clearing your browsing data, if that clearing includes site data.
- Private or incognito windows generally forget them when you close the window.
If your saved stops vanish, one of those is almost always the reason.
Why it is built this way
Two reasons.
The first is privacy. A list of the stops you use every day is a fairly precise description of where you live, where you work and when you travel. Not collecting it at all is a stronger protection than collecting it and promising to look after it.
The second is that it removes a barrier. Requiring an account to save a stop would stop most people bothering, for a feature whose entire value is that it saves a few seconds.
The trade-off is the per-device limitation above, which we think is the right way round for this particular feature.
Which stops are worth saving
The obvious ones are home and work. Two others are worth thinking about:
The stop you come home from, which people forget because they save the outbound one. It is a different stop, usually across the road or elsewhere in the town centre, and it is the one you need in a hurry at the end of the evening.
Your fallback stop. If your usual route is not running, the alternative is often a busier road a few minutes' walk away. Finding it when you need it, in the dark, is harder than finding it now. There is more on that idea in how to check the last bus home.
Finding a stop to save
If you know the town, start there — town pages list the stops and routes for a place, and the town list covers everywhere we hold data for.
If you are standing at the stop, nearby stops will find it from your location, which is usually faster than typing a name — particularly since stop names repeat heavily and you would need the town as well to narrow it down.
Once you are on the right stop page, check it is the right side of the road before saving. The destinations listed against the departures are the reliable way to tell; there is more on this in finding your nearest bus stop.
Keeping the link instead
If you want a stop that works across devices, the stop page link does the job. Every stop has its own address containing its unique national code, so a bookmarked or shared link always opens exactly that stop — not one with a similar name in another town. That is also the best way to send someone the stop you actually meant.