Search a town, city or village to see its stops on a map, or type a stop name, a “stop name in town” phrase like “town centre otley”, or an ATCO/NaPTAN code directly.
Searching by place matters more than it sounds. The national stop register has around 344,000 entries, and the names repeat relentlessly — over 1,700 stops are called “Post Office” and more than 1,100 are “Bus Station”. Searching a bare stop name across the country is close to useless, so places come first and you pick the stop off a map of the town.
Every bus stop in Great Britain has a national identifier — an ATCO code, recorded in the NaPTAN register — and it is the only reliable way to name a stop. Two stops on opposite sides of the same road share a name, serve opposite directions, and are completely different places to be standing. The code tells them apart; the name cannot.
If you have a code, paste it in and you will land straight on that stop. Otherwise search the town first. Stops also record which direction they face and which locality they belong to, which is why a big place is offered as a list of suburbs rather than as one unmanageable pile.
Bus operators publish their live positions voluntarily through the national open-data service, and not all of them do. Where an operator publishes, you get real vehicles moving in something close to real time. Where they do not, you get the timetable — which is still the right answer to "when is the next one", just without the reassurance of seeing it.
London works differently again: Transport for London runs its own arrival predictions, and those are used there because they are better than anything that could be derived from position reports alone. Elsewhere, a live vehicle has to be matched to the scheduled run it is working before it can tell you anything useful, and on a frequent route that match is not always certain enough to publish.
Live bus positions are on the router map — tick “Live buses”. Operator punctuality is on the bus performance page, vehicle sightings record which buses we have seen working which routes, and door-to-door plans bus, rail and walking together.
Guide: why a quarter of buses arrive early — what that says about how bus timetables are written, and why it makes bus punctuality read so differently from rail.