Bus time tables - can you trust them?

[hwolge]

When studying BUSses in time tables and the Journey Planner I see all kinds of estimates of journey times. I understand that it varies a lot over the day, but how much and when?

For instance, with trips like Wimbledon-Morden, West Ruislip-Uxbridge and Cockfosters-High Barnet it seems that there is quite a pessimistic estimate in effect all but early mornings and late nights. An example:

Cockfosters Road/Bramley Rd-High Barnet
(on a Wednesday - JourneyPlanner)
dep - arr = dur
05:14-05:24=0:10 - very early
06:40-07:01=0:21 - peak starting
07:35-08:00=0:25 - peak
10:22-10:44=0:22 - realistic???
14:22-14:44=0:22 - realistic???
17:59-18:22=0:23 - peak
20:05-20:15=0:10 - late

Is there really congested traffic in areas like this at 10AM or 2PM? I don't think so...

Does anyone have experience with this? And care to comment? When IS IT REALLY PEAK TRAFFIC in these areas and HOW BAD IS IT in the MIDDLE OF THE DAY?

My problem is that it is somewhat tricky to travel all the way to London to find it out myself...

Happy for any info...
/HÃ¥kan

[greatkingrat]

The TfL Journey Planner is rather confusing when it comes to bus times. The time it shows is actually the maximum journey time which equals maximum waiting time + journey time. So if the 307 runs every 10 minutes it will show a 24 minute journey time while the true figure is 14 minutes.

So the real times according to the Journey Planner are 11 mins early morning/late evening, 13 mins daytime, 14 mins peak. As I live in High Barnet I can say that the daytime time is about right, the peak time is a bit optimistic though.

[hwolge]

A quick follow up then.

Are the departure times worth noting even or is the bus frequency the only important info?

[greatkingrat]

I would ignore the exact departure times, the frequency is the most important thing.

[barrykas]

Just to follow this up, TfL have stopped providing the "full" timetables to the guy who runs http://www.busmap.org/ so that's gradually going to become less useful

You can, however, still get the timetables for individual stops through the TfL Journey Planner site, but those aren't particularly useful either as they give "approximate" frequencies.

And First have a site with timetables for the routes they operate, which can be found HERE.

HTH,

Barry

[Starkey7]

Well, they can say what they like about buses, but in my ongoing mission to go on every single route in London, I've had remarkably few difficulties. I've seldom had to wait longer than five minutes and have only had a few absolute disasters. And they're so warm and comfortable inside when it's Winter.

It may interest you to know that I'm up to the 262 at the moment and going strong, although it's not a "how many days can you do it in" thing - more a long term goal. And I think that I beat one of ********'s records by passing through Finsbury Park seven times! At least I think that it was seven...