Archived: TfL website – One year on

This week marked the first anniversary of the launch of our new website. The new site, which works well on mobiles, tablets and desktops, replaced our previous website dating back to 2007.

The site, used by 81% of Londoners, brings together live data about all forms of transport in London and is a one-stop-shop for everything you need to know about public transport and roads.

Since launch customers have made over 250 million visits and viewed 1.2 billion pages and our most recent survey shows satisfaction at 90%, the highest ever.

We have also seen usage on mobile phones overtake desktop computers with 120 million visits on mobile and 107 million on desktops, with the remainder coming from tablets. This reflects the fact that the site is much better suited to mobiles and customers are increasingly using it on the move.

TfL, Home Page, New Website
TfL home page at launch in March 2014


New features launched today

We’ve been quietly updating the site with new features and fixing problems throughout the past year. Today we’ve updated the Journey Planner to make it easier to type in locations, which are now suggested as you type, not just for stations and stops but also for Santander Cycles locations, places of interest and postal addresses.

The way cycle journeys are shown is significantly improved with multiple route options being shown at the same time on our maps, live docking station status and improved access to Santander Cycles journeys.

We’ve also made it easier to plan journeys with options such as bus only, fewest changes, least walking and step free with one click from the bottom of the results page.

Future plans

Just as we’ve done throughout the past year we will be continuing to improve the site reflecting changes to the transport system and customer feedback.

Changes planned for the next 12 months include;

  • New rail services on London Overground and TfL Rail
  • Improvements to Journey Planner options and travel planning beyond London borders
  • Easier to use area for contacting TfL customer services
  • Improvements to travel alert services
  • Congestion Charging and Enforcement services integrated into the main, mobile friendly website
  • Further personalised elements of the site and wider use of single sign on

We’re committed to continuing these improvements so the site can be better, more reliable and easier to use for customers.

We really value your feedback, good and bad. Feel free to let us know what you think by commenting on this blog.

39 Comments

  1. There’s a little problem at the moment.

    Try journey planner from any postcode (eg w1a 1aa) to Hyde Park Corner. Accept option 2. Result “Journey planner could not find any results to your search, please try again”.

      1. I tried it again, waiting a bit longer for the suggestions which are a bit slow on my machine and it worked as expected. Previously, I pressed return before the suggestions came up so had the old list and map — which is where I saw the numbered options and selected 2 “Hyde Park Corner, Westminster (London)”.

        It looks like I need to be in less of a hurry.

      2. Hi Phil,

        I’m replying to this random recent post because there doesn’t seem to be any way for me to submit a post anywhere on this blog. And nowhere on the tfl website to submit feedback about the website. I’m not on Facebook, Twitter or WordPress. Please tell me there’s a way to submit feedback without being a member of one of those websites?! It would be a bit of an “accessibility fail” if that isn’t possible. How can I report a 404?

  2. Dear Phil

    I am currently studying a master in Creative Technology and for my project I am proposing a business idea to enable THE OFFICIAL TFL APP that would work on the underground whilst travelling. The network would be LAN wifi which passengers can connect to on the train, this would be agreed with working with Virgin to supply the infrastructure on the trains using WIFI HUBS and remote servers located at the driver carriage, the information will be pinged by the servers already installed by Virgin on stations. The LAN network will be just for use on the train to use the TFL app that I would also like to propose that this APP would:
    1/ give the user up to date information about tube lines, i.e/ delays, strikes, closures etc….

    2/ give the user station information such as, what stations have lifts, disabled facilities, toilets

    3/ provide users alternative routes and timings (real time) if they were to enter location A to location B and best exit out the station and step free access

    4/ perhaps notify a passenger when they have arrived at their destination i.e/ if they were asleep their mobile will ring/vibrate

    5/ Local amenities such as restaurants/theatre shows/ tourist attractions

    all the above would be linked with your new website 🙂

    Hey i know this is not real but its a business idea and the name of the app will be ‘MIND THE APP’

    It be great to hear your thoughts and if there anything you feel could help me get a 1st in my project.
    thank you for reading

    1. Hello Minda, we release all public TfL data (or ‘open data’) for developers to use in their own software and services and we encourage software developers/students to use these feeds to present customer travel information in innovative ways, please see our website section “Open data users”. All the best with your idea.

  3. Doesn’t seem to be working, I’ve input a from and to station, no suggestions were given as I typed them, and have waited over 10 minutes with a screen showing ‘fetching results’. If I try to use one of my recent journey searches all the fields become highlighted in red and demand I input details so presumably all my previous journey planning is lost but the details of them remain in the list.

    I’m just testing as a result of receiving an e-mail about this but doesn’t look too good for planning an actual journey.

    I’ve now spent about 25 minutes trying different stations including typing (say) Victoria Underground rather than just Victoria – not once has any auto filling in taken place and I have yet to actually get any planned journey results. Hope it works when I really do need to plan a journey.

    (By the way it was working fine for me before today, as I input journey details suggestions used to appear, results appeared pretty quickly – the only problem I ever had with the system was that it would not show me earlier journeys, just later so if I decided I wanted to travel earlier I’d have to go back and start again inputting an earlier time.)

  4. Out of curiosity, what sort of maintenance are you currently doing that requires taking down the site and redirecting all traffic to http://maintenance.tfl.gov.uk/ ?
    I thought your amazing combination of varnish, auto-scaling groups and blue/green deployments would be able to protect users from most sorts of changes you’d want to make.

    (BTW, stylesheets on the maintenance site don’t load for any urls with more than one forward slash in the path, eg http://maintenance.tfl.gov.uk/info-for/open-data-users/ )

    1. Hi Luke, we never really take the main site down for maintenance as we have multiple environments to switch between. We had a networking problem however last night around 1.30am which was fixed within about half an hour. During this time we switched to the maintenance page. We’ll review that to see whether we could have handled it differently. Sorry for any inconvenience.

      Some of our sub-sites which are run separately may require the use of the maintenance page from time to time and we may also use it if we ran into a problem affecting all environments.

  5. The removal of the ability to download Bus timetables in pdf form is a real pain. You have to be online.and go through several clicks to get to the route timetable. Luckily there are other non-TfL websites that have taken this up. Maybe not as upto date as TfL but better than nothing. General rule: when yuo remove functionality from a website it is a Fail.

  6. Hello there! Your custom font seems broken on this blog – it’s ‘NJ Signing’ in the Safari web inspector but is being rendered as a generic serif font…

    1. Hi, sometimes that happens when the device being used does not have the specific font installed, then you’ll see something that is “close”, such as the generic serif or sans-serif font. We’ll double-check our configuration in WordPress, thanks

  7. Auto complete seems far from optimal – the usual case is to start typing and have the list gradually refined as you go, but it seems to do a new request for each character, resulting in the suggestions disappearing between one character and the next. (Latest Safari on OS X Mavericks).

    It does appear like the results are cached locally for each completion request, as “backspace” provides an instant suggestions list.

    If the list is too long to filter completely client-side it would be nice if client side filtering at least took over after the first few characters so the annoying period of suggestion invisibility after each character didn’t happen.

    Good job in general though.

    1. “St Pancras” also doesn’t suggest the underground station. I’m not sure having a single auto-complete list including both addresses and stations is such a great idea…

  8. I regularly use the website across many mobile and desktop devices, works effortlessly, clearly a huge beast of a site but the best one stop shop, public travel site for London. Also updated frequently and I love the Google maps integration, especially on Bus routes and walking, miles better than before, well done TFL… Now reduce my fares!

  9. I typed “St Pancas” into the search box as my destination. Nothing appeared in the drop down box, so I pressed enter. When my journey appeared, my destination was listed as “Camden (London), Carluccios St Pancras”. The cynic in me can’t help but wonder how much Carluccios paid for that little piece of advertising. Of course, my actual destination was “St Pancras International Railway Station”, which really should have been the default in the system.

  10. Seems to be ok on my phone but not on Safari 5.0.6 on Mac OS 10.5.8.Have you stopped supporting older browsers? was fine last week.
    I’m trying for Poplar DLR to Wapping but neither station comes up, just a list of streets in each area and i have no idea where any of them are . If i use ‘Poplar, Greater London’ to ‘Wapping, London E1W’ -the closest general suggestions it gives, the suggested journey is
    13 mins Walk to Blackwall
    11 mins DLR to Tower Gateway DLR Station
    15 mins Walk to Nesham Street, City of London!!!
    39 mins total and over 1km away from Wapping station!
    Internet explorer on mobile phone is fine- the stations still come up first. change at Shadwell and it takes 14 mins !!

  11. Is https://reportit.tfl.gov.uk part of your service?

    It seems strange that if you go to the “view previous reported issues” link there are apparently no previous reported issues to list — even if you keep the map to the whole of London and expand the reporting dates to include the last 12 months.

  12. Perhaps you should add a feedback capture mechanism to each page on the site? Like the “Is there anything wrong with this page?” link that can be found on every GOV.UK page.
    You could link it to JIRA to make feedback assessment more methodical, easily report on feedback received etc.

  13. When planning cycle/walking journeys, it would be good to have distances shown in miles and yards by default rather than metric. Indeed I can’t even find an option to change to imperial. Many UK sites (the RAC, Yell.com, bank branch locators etc.) give distances in imperial by default, so it seems odd that TFL doesn’t even give the option. We’re not all tourists from metric countries, and in any case, surely part of being a tourist is being able to experience the culture of the host country! Thank you.

  14. Hello Phil,

    On January 12, 2015 I left the following comment on one of your blogs:

    “On a closely-related matter, I would like the option of seeing the location of Barclays Cycle Hire docking stations when I look at central London on Google maps. (If I could hover over the docking station’s icon to get its real-time bikes/spaces status, then that would be “icing on the cake”.)”

    Obviously, it’s Santander now. Is TfL in touch with Google maps at all? Any chance of collaboration on this?

  15. This might be a great site, but I’ve been waiting for a refund of more than £1400 for three weeks Now. Why can’t tfl get the basics right? Better customer service is needed and a response to my complaint would be great. Stop ignoring me, and give me my refund. If there was another public transportation system I would use them, and switch my supplier. Alas there isn’t one and I’m forced to use tfl

    1. Hi there, I’d suggest you contact our customer services team about your refund request, along with any complaints you have. They can be reached on 0343 222 1234.

  16. Proof-read of: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/maps/track/tube:

    – At the Heathrow loop, the overlay arrows should be set to white, as in the background.
    – When you zoom in, there appears to be some odd white triangles at Rotherhithe and Wapping Stations.
    – If you are removing the Cable car from the map, you can reposition the ‘North Greenwich’ label to the south east of the blob and add a cable car symbol.
    – For the same reason add the cable car symbol to ‘Royal Victoria’

  17. I’m having a problem with the journey planner at the moment. Trying to plan a journey from High Barnet to East Finchley — two stations about four stops apart on the Northern Line.

    TFL status says there is a good service on the Northern Line, yet journey planner is inexplicably suggesting a journey by bus. If I turn off bus as a method of transport, I then get a longwinded journey taking me through Kings Cross.

    Seems a bit weird, when there is apparently a “good” service along the single line directly linking the two stations.

    1. This was fixed a few days after I reported it again through the contact form. I had a hard job finding the website problems section, otherwise I would have probably done that in the first place. I think journey planner should probably appear as one of the top level options at https://tfl.gov.uk/help-and-contact/ — it really does not belong in *any* of the present top level categories.

      Better still, there should probably be a “report a journey planning problem” option on the JP page itself.

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