How live bus tracking works
Every bus you see tracked online starts with a GPS box on the vehicle. Here's the journey that position takes before it reaches your screen — and why it sometimes goes wrong.
Where the data comes from
Since 2020, bus operators in England have been legally required to publish their vehicles' real-time positions to the Department for Transport's Bus Open Data Service (BODS). The bus's ticket machine or tracking unit reports its GPS position roughly every 10–30 seconds; BODS republishes the national feed every 10 seconds.
Scheduled vs live times
A departure board can show two kinds of time:
- Scheduled — what the printed timetable says. This is what operators registered with the traffic commissioner.
- Live / predicted — an estimate based on where the bus actually is right now.
Live predictions are usually accurate to within a couple of minutes in towns, but degrade in heavy traffic and on long rural routes.
Why buses “vanish” or become ghosts
- Tracker off or faulty — the bus is running but not reporting. It will still turn up.
- Cancelled journey — the timetable slot exists but no bus was assigned. This is the classic “ghost bus”.
- Driver logged into the wrong journey — the bus shows on the wrong route or direction.
- Dead zones — rural valleys and depots with poor signal cause gaps in the trail.
A good rule: if a bus is due in under 10 minutes and shows as tracking, trust the live time. If it's not tracking, treat the scheduled time as a best case.
How accurate is it?
Tracking quality varies by operator, because different ticket-machine systems report with different frequency and reliability. Large operators using modern systems report nearly every vehicle; some small independents still have patchy coverage.
This site's timetables come from BODS, refreshed every week. Live positions are shown where the operator publishes them.