Archived: New website launched today

You’ll notice a change at tfl.gov.uk today as we’ve switched over completely to our new website.

We’ve been trialling it in beta since mid 2013 and adding elements, but it’s now become ready to replace the old desktop and mobile site.

TfL, Home Page, New Website
The brand new TfL website has just launched, with a fresh design and new and improved features.


Why have we made this change?

The old site was really popular, with around 20 million visits a month, and 90% of customers rated it positively.  However, it had become outdated and was poorly suited to modern devices like tablets and smartphones.

We reviewed all the research we had about what you wanted from a TfL site, supplementing it with some new work, and went back to the basics.

What people really wanted was a great Journey Planner, maps, live travel information, localised and personalised content – all on their device of choice.  We needed to be great at catering for mobiles, tablets, laptops and desktops.

So that’s what we’ve done, wrapping it up in a new fresh design.

So what’s changed then?

You’ll see straight away on the homepage that the Journey Planner is even more upfront and central than it ever was.  That’s because about half the people using the site visit for Journey Planner.

The navigation is a lot simpler – things which are useful for making a journey are at the top, things about our company are at the bottom.

Once you delve into the Journey Planner you’ll notice that it now uses Google Maps, which will be familiar to most people, and these are now a feature throughout the site.

Also on the homepage you can see we have the familiar Tube service board and similar boards for all our other forms of transport, including roads.  For buses you can enter a route or stop name on the homepage to see a route map and live arrivals.  You can also save your most used stops as favourites and they will be pinned to the homepage for one-click access.

Tfl, New Website, Journey Planner
The Journey Planner is even more upfront and central than it ever was, and now uses Google Maps.

Below the Journey Planner are three new buttons – Live departures, Maps and Nearby.

Live departures lets you check the next bus, Tube, DLR or Overground service and get route maps in the case of buses.  Maps brings together all our mapping information, with the new interactive Google maps.  Nearby is something completely new.  It places your location on a map and shows you all the public transport stops and cycle docking stations around you, with their live status and next service.

There’s lots more to explore, from the new search through to better information for visitors.

We’re also being clearer than ever before about our projects and improvements, which are now easier to find and understand.  We have more work planned to make the corporate content better still so it is easier to see how we operate and what our plans are.

How can I tell you what I think?

All the way through we’ve been really keen to hear from you about what’s good or what could be improved.  That has not changed with the launch, we have a feedback bar on the homepage and will be doing a more in-depth survey next week to get your views.

We’re really grateful for all the feedback we have had so far – please keep it coming!!

What will you do now?

For a while we’ll keep working to iron out any problems on this new site.  Then we have a really exciting programme of developments to make things better still – from a better Journey Planner to more personalised services.  There is plenty more for us to do to make it better still.

150 Comments

  1. Would be better if the service updates didn’t fail every time they try to auto-update (e.g., every minute). Doesn’t look ready to go live, honestly.

      1. It shit !! you took something perfect and painted it red! previously you could plan a journey and show all options, now you have to choose either quickest route OR least changes. You can’t just show all routes possible (which is very important towards the end of the night??? ) AND it now only shows 4 time slots on each page instead of 10 or so. Really bad update in my opinion. Bring back the original quick !!!

        1. Hi Dean. Actually the new site offers exactly the same options and journey types as the old site. In the 8 months since the site launched we’ve seen journey planning increase by over 10% and we know it’s working well for many people. We are working on a feature which will give more choice of journey types from Spring of next year and will be making further improvements all the time. I hope we’ll win you over in due course.

          1. Nice selective quoting of Dean there. The bit you clipped from his message was “it now only shows 4 time slots on each page instead of 10 or so”. Previously, if memory serves you’d get four journey options, and clicking ‘earlier’ or ‘later’ would return *additional* journey times as well as the original ones – so the number of journeys displayed would increase. This was really handy for journeys with several different combinations. Now you can only see four journeys on the results screen at a time which, if there are four different modal combinations available, doesn’t help you see when the *next* iteration of each version will be. Of course, given the size of everything now, displaying any more results would require even more scrolling – I really miss the space-efficient old design.

      2. Please leave the original option in place too, for those that prefer to find all that information which is now missing. Thanks

      3. I cannot find out why the W3 bus stop in Middle lane Crouch End in the direction of Wood Green is closed as your page is NOT WORKING! Also there was no dot Matrix board at the stop – how long is this closure and lack of board going to go on for please?
        Kate Macfarlane

        1. Hi Kate, pages on the site were unavailable for about 40 minutes yesterday for which I’d like to apologise. I can’t help you with the operational questions about that stop or the dot matrix board. However our customer services team should be able to assist. You can get in touch in a number of ways; Twitter @TfLBusAlerts, phone 0343 222 1234 or go to the Help and Contacts section of the website and complete an online form.

      4. Hi Phil, the Plan a Journey does not seem to work at all with Firefox on an Android. When I start to type a start station, random characters start to appear and I cannot choose a station. It is even worse on the destination where more random characters start appearing making it impossible to choose a destination. I have checked with other users and they have the same problem so it’s not just something wrong with my phone. I am using a Motorola Moto G 1st Gen with Android Lollipop 5.0.2 and Firefox 37.0.2.

  2. Horribly slow. Just tried to plan a journey from Bounds Green to Heathrow by Tube (un-checking bus, train etc) and it told me that “Journey planner could not find any results to your search, please try again”. Then it worked. Then tried Finsbury Park to Heathrow – again, “Journey planner could not find any results to your search, please try again”.

    This new website is not ready

  3. I think there’s lots of really great stuff in here, can’t wait to use it for real.

    My only question would be on the inclusion of advertising – given that you say so many visits are primarily for Journey Planner, how much revenue is the advertising bringing in for TFL? It seems like quite a big expense to page layouts and user experience on a public website, for perhaps very minimal return?

    1. Tom – it’s a balance between business and user needs here. We have some key messages to get to customers about services, travelling around London and safety. The promotional space is a good vehicle for this. It also allows us to showcase London photographically and cater more for visitors than we have done before. Advertising, which will feature some of the time in this space, allows us to offset the running costs of the site.
      In terms of user needs we are catering well for Journey Planner users by putting it in the primary position, so we think it’s a fair balance. On mobile we tone down the promotional space and upweight the journey planner and service info.

  4. Please reinstate the sectional bus maps – NE London, SE SW and so on, as well as the spider and borough bus maps. These are invaluable in terms of point to point planning for travel outside a local area. One needs to be able to see both start and end destination and calculate distance. Scaling up from a localised a Google map is useless. The homepage has been over simplified and is too focused on smartphone users

    Performance is also atrocious – I appreciate you may be having teething troubles here but it does not help your case.

  5. What an appalling rewrite. Slow, journey planner doesn’t return ANY results for a bus from Brixton to Streatham.
    Where can I download bus route maps? The interactive maps are slow and useless.
    Then when I tried to leave feedback either “Submit feedback” button not working or someone forgot to set up confirm message.
    Did anyone test this? How much of our money was wasted on this?

    1. Hi Stephen – The site has not been working as well as we would have liked today, we’re working hard to make it faster. Journey Planner is working well though, so it might be worth giving that another try for your journey.

      We will put bus route spider maps back over the next few days, in addition to the new interactive bus maps, as there seems to be a fair amount of demand for them.

      1. Well, it can now find buses from Brixton to Streatham but cant find any buses from Vauxhall to Streatham (actually my original journey request).
        “Journey Planner could not find any results…..”

        This looks like an early beta test and is not suitable for live release, particulalry for such an important resource.
        Forget about Twitter and marketing rubbish like that and concentrate on getting the important stuff working.

  6. What about the many many users and visitors that still need access from older devices?

    PLEASE keep a link to a simple HTML based journeyplanner alive for the rest of us. And use your clever technology to detect this automatically, and give us a choice and separate (short) URLs we can bookmark to choose what works best for each.

    A clever website with a cute animated bus while waiting is nice from an iPad and expensive smartphone. But frustrating if in a hurry between stops with a more mundane phoneor blackberry.

    We also need to maintain the basic and effective functionality around for the rest of users – i.e. A basic HTML-based website with no stylesheets or javascript, just the basics:
    From, To, Time (with Now default), checkboxes for transport options and other basic preferences (fastest, cheapest, least changes, step-free, etc)

    The priority should be fast page load (small size) and minimum clicks & characters needed to plan a new journey.

    A link to the richer site for those with more time, faster connectivity and better devices can be included at the bottom.

    But dont forget to Keep it Simple, fast, and usable by my Mum (with her old phone).

    1. Thanks for your comments – I appreciate there are a range of devices out there and not everything is the latest Android, iPhone or Windows phone.

      We’ll have a think about whether there’s more we can do to make it work better on more limited devices.

      1. Thanks Phil
        The key thing is we already had a basic journeyplanner mobile site that mostly worked.
        So short-term, how about a link to the old interface?

        Yes, there are a few simple tweaks that could make it even simpler and better from more (older) devices – and happy to share those suggestions.

        But let’s not re-invent the wheel.
        Seems easier to restore the old site somewhere, and improve both the new and ‘basic functionality’ sites in parallel over time.

        Keep up the good work.

  7. I am pleased to note that Bus Spider Maps will be returned to the site. *Please* ensure that the Central London, Central London Night Bus, North East, North West, South East and South West quadrant maps are also returned too. It is worth noting that the night bus map is the only such document that TfL publishes that gives a network map view of buses at night in Central London. I know there are some spider maps but they’re not the same form of presentation. Not everyone has to have their information pulled down to the lowest common denominator.

    I am amazed you got to the point of going live without having the Maps facility working on the beta site nor advising users that you proposed to remove bus map information that visually presents local bus routes from given locations on the bus network. If they’re useful at bus stops then surely they’re useful via a computer?

    1. I can understand that a number of customers do find the spider maps useful, which is why we are bringing them back into the new site.

      However we do have a map facility now which will show you local bus routes from given locations on the bus network.
      More than that, it shows you live arrival times and it’s aware of your exact location.

      Hopefully we can win you over to these new maps. If not, we’ll have the spider maps in place.

      1. Hi Phil

        I’ve managed to find the new interactive map facility that shows bus routes from a given stop. It’s very clever, and it’s great that it seems to work from any stop.

        But I can only see the routes if I repeatedly zoom out, if I zoom out too far the map becomes covered with station blobs, I can’t see which numbered route goes where, and Google Maps doesn’t show place names.

        For route planning the spider maps are very much simpler to use, and you can see all the information in one go.

        If you can give us both types of map, perhaps everyone will be happy.

      2. Phil, thanks for the reply – I may well be won over but I might not be. Thus far I’ve not been able to see the new facility or use it. Much of your thinking is about journey planning “on the go” but some of us do plan in advance whereby more conventional means are suitable.

        TfL as a public body, and one which is politically accountable, should show reasonable flexibility in the scope of information facilities it provides. Hosting 6 pdf files for the normal quadrant bus maps and providing some simple links to them is not going to present you with any issues whatsoever in terms of system or design overhead. I appreciate the pdfs may not be “ideal” in smartphone / IPad world but neither is a pdf file of fares and Travelcard prices which you’ve ported across from the old website. I would like to see a commitment from you to return the quadrant bus maps in addition to the spider maps and hopefully you will be able to make it.

      3. Yes, but the “given” location is a specific bus stop, which means you have to first identify every single stop in the area, and then collate the information from all of them in order to get the complete picture.

        Moreover, it doesn’t recognise postcodes and most certainly is not aware of my location.

  8. How on earth did this get through an approval process? It’s awful. Lots of functionality (eg bus spider maps) removed? Go and read diamond geezer’s blog for a thorough analysis of what a mess you’ve made of this.

  9. Glad to hear you’re bringing back the spider diagrams, which are wonderful but have regularly been sidelined on your site in recent years. I hope you will make them easy to find on the new site. These are without doubt the clearest presentation of bus stop and route information I’ve seen anywhere in the world and TfL should be proud of them, not keep trying to ditch them.

    Why not make links to the spider diagrams a toggle-able layer on the interactive map, too? Something like City of London Consulting’s excellent Android app London Bus Stop Maps, which has sadly not been updated in years but made finding your nearest spider diagram on the move a doddle. Sometimes travel’s not just about getting somewhere specific, but rather is about serendipitous wandering – why not find your nearest spider diagram and decide from the options it displays where you fancy heading next?

    Elsewhere, you need some basic redirects set up for key URLs from the old site to their equivalent locations on the new site. For instance, TfL’s ad campaign for many years told me to check for weekend travel disruption by visiting tfl.gov.uk/check – but that’s no longer of any use as that URL has been killed off. Surely the old site had a list of redirect aliases like this which someone could simply have referred to and updated for the new site, so anyone using them would not be inconvenienced?

    Finally, where’s the list of forthcoming bus route changes, which used to be at /assets/livetravelnews/realtime/buses/bus-service-changes.pdf ? This URL inexplicably now redirects to the live tube/Overground disruption map, so it seems in that instance a redirect you *have* put in doesn’t even make sense! This document needs restoring, and preferably updating more often as it’s so infrequent that I generally have to turn to the unofficial LondonBusRoutes.net for updates instead!

    See also Diamond Geezer’s list of other missing/cut-back/hard-to-find/ things:
    http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/tfl-beta.html
    Were they useful on Sunday but not today? Why *take information away* from your passengers? Isnt’ that the opposite of a web site’s raison d’être?

    Overall it feels like a rushed attempt to modernise a site on the cheap without adequate staff and resources to do it properly, which I fear under the current political administrations in London and Westminster is exactly what it is, sadly.

  10. Live arrivals does not work. The link you posted for mlmplanning works, but on the ‘new improved’ website when you put bus stop details in, the reply for the next bus is NaN mins. This caused huge problems for me yesterday, and again today, and I don’t understand why you would launch a website when one of the most fundamental parts of it isn’t working

  11. Utterly, totally useless.

    I have lived in London all my life. Unlike a lot of people, I don’t need a rail map – I can remember it (all of it)… but Buses change, the routes are altered & for large parts of London, I will need a map ( & possibly a time-table)
    I can get NR & Overground train times from the National Rail sites, but not “tube” of course, nor the first/last tube-train times.

    I tried “Maps”
    Utterly useless for buses.
    STILL no spider maps or area maps, or division by Borough.
    All of which are (or should I say WERE) very useful & informative.
    Your shiny new web-site has LESS information than before. Very clever (not)
    [ I tend not to use “Journey Planner” since it gave very peculiar answers regarding getting to Paddington (NR) early in the morning from the E. I therefore use maps + timetables ]

    Rail: both Over-&-Under-grounD time-tables not visible.

    STILL NO Site-map, or “contact us”

    Oh & like a very large number of people, I’m still using WinXP ( It’s STABLE! ) & IE8 – broken – won’t respond. ( I’m using a Chrome browser to type this )
    Will it work in Ubuntu LINUX/UNIX? Or on Open/Libre Office? { Which is what I will probably change to, after Win XP goes down…)

  12. So far I’ve only used one of the most basic functions of a public transport website – finding a map of the network, to use whilst on the move. Unfortunately, there is no such thing any more – it seems that someone has fallen in love with interactive maps but hasn’t yet learned of their significant limitations.

    Interactive maps are handy for the cases where you’re exploring something for yourself, have good connectivity and good dexterity. But they tend to be badly implemented (particularly for mobile devices) and hence a PDF or even image are often preferred. Also, those with limited finger ability would have better luck with a downloadable map they can navigate for themselves and not, for example, be limited to a small proportion of their screen. This is also true of those who have good dexterity but just want a better interface.

    Finally, it’s impossible to use interactive maps when you’re underground. Yours are better than most, in that they load all of the data and don’t appear to need connectivity as you pan and scale the maps,but you can’t initiate a search when you’re in a tunnel – unless you happen to still have the right tab open in a browser and the information hasn’t been purged from the cache – and clearing the cache is a pretty common thing for mobile browsers to do.

    Please bring back downloadable maps. Keep interactive ones if you want, but allow us to use the transport system without spending money on data and when we’re already using the system just out of contact.

      1. When I try an access it from the Open Data sction of the website the widget page doesn’t load.

        The widget code uses this URL- http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/syndication/feeds/serviceboard-fullscreen.htm which loads OK but I get this error- “Refused to display ‘http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/syndication/feeds/serviceboard-fullscreen.htm’ in a frame because it set ‘X-Frame-Options’ to ‘SAMEORIGIN’.”

        The same thing is happening on the National Rail website which used the widget too- http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/service_disruptions/indicator.aspx

  13. Well i think it’s great – love the new design and the mobile experience is a step change from what it was before. Great to see tfl investing in their site rather than trying to hive off the user experience into an app – more accessible for all i say.

    Love the user-centric approach that you’ve taken to the whole project – and i’m sure once the initial grumbles are ironed out, it’ll be held up as an example of how to run high profile web redesigns

    Nice work guys

  14. The links to complaint about a taxi, i.e., the PCO are broken/don’t work, just a 404 error. This is ongoing despite the fact it has been reported to you verbally and in writing. Also given the fact that the PCO NEVER answers their phones despite multiple calls you should make an effort to ensure contact in writing to them is NOT obstructed – perhaps there’s a fishy reason why contact with them is impossible and it suits them/TFL to only have snail mail?

  15. The biggest most obvious thing I find annoying is that you have to scroll down the homepage to get to the line status display. Like most regular commuters the thing I visit the site several times a day to find out is “Is my journey to/from work going to be delayed?”. Given the massive amounts of space available to the right of the journey planner on a desktop screen, couldn’t we have it up there instead of below the fold?

  16. A good looking update (I have been following since the beta began), but can you please remove the Train Operating Companies that don’t have services in London? Arriva Trains Wales is irrelevant for obvious reasons and means scrolling down to see the ones people can use here.

    A separate question (not feedback), what is the reason that Tramlink is considered separate to Tube, Overground and DLR? I’ve never really understood this, it’s not on the tube map and TfL seem almost embarrassed by it from the way it is segregated in many places, especially on the new site!

    1. And another thing to add on the above, there needs to be a better way of showing the statuses on national rail, for instance the whole of the First Great Western network is shown as having a planned engineering closure right this minute and the further info is terrible. Can you not separate the routes out and have an up coming engineering work section?

  17. Oh dear. There’s now *so much* whitespace and enormous text on a desktop display – is there an option to shrink the text? On the main Status Updates page I can only see as far down the list as the Metropolitan line without scrolling down – bad for usability. I second the comment to put the small status panel higher up on the homepage so it’s visible above the fold on most desktop displays – as it is, the big photo-background is certainly pretty, but a big detriment to usability.

    On the Nearby page, ‘use my current location’ doesn’t work, at least on my work computer. This doesn’t seem to be a firewall problem though, as it turns out that nothing I enter in the search box will return a search result unless it’s the name of a station – postcodes don’t work, and nor do street names. They always used to. I’ve also had occasional problems on the beta site in the last couple of weeks with journey-planning searches involving postcodes – some common postcodes I use would occasionally work and occasionally not.

    I’d also echo the calls for a rethink of the National Rail status updates – the current situation is utterly absurd. Get rid of all of the non-London operators/lines (or hide them under a tab for ‘elsewhere in the UK’), and overhaul the way a single problem on a TOC’s network results in ‘Planned closure’ or similar for the entire TOC. Also, the narrow width of this column and patchy approach to paragraph spacing makes it incredibly difficult to scan down a list of TOC disruption easily – have a look at today’s ‘Planned closure’ information for Heathrow Express and FGW and weep.

    A related problem is the list of closed/disrupted stations on the tube status page – see Diamond Geezer’s critique of this. It’s now utterly useless.

    Journey Planner never saves my preferences for future visits (and never did on the old site, as I recall), so *every* time I have to click into the accessibility settings to change the walking speed from ‘glacial granny’ to ‘realistic’. Please fix this!

    Oh, and one more thing that springs to mind: I’m sure it’s in the works, probably, but *please* bring back the old fare table, rather than just providing a PDF link.

    It’s clear how much effort has been put into making a single website that scales very well for mobile, and is optimised for touchscreens – but the way it’s been implemented has unfortunately meant a *huge* retrograde step for desktop viewers.

    1. Hi there, thanks for this. We have each of these issues in our list to deal with so you will see progress on them in the coming weeks.

      In terms of nearby you won’t get a good result on a corporate network, but you can type in any station, stop or pier and get the stuff around that. We’ll be adding address and postcode capability to this as well soon.

      National Rail is an interesting one. It’s not clear where we should stop, but clearly not at the boundary of London. Logic says people could be travelling anywhere in the UK. We show updates for the Island Line, which seems very amusing, but as people commute or visit from there to London, should we not show its status? Clearly the presentation needs to be improved, but we took the view that something was better than nothing and chose to use the National Rail feed now it has been made available to us.

      1. “you can type in any station, stop or pier and get the stuff around that”
        Have you actually tried doing that for “Waterloo”? The first location offered is outside the Royal Mail sorting office in Uxbridge.

  18. The use of highly coloured image backgrounds is, IMHO a step backwards in terms of accessibility. White as a background is perfectly good for separating figure from ground. And the excessive amounts of vertical scrolling for desktop machines is a very off-putting trend in modern web fashion (the biggest sin being infinite scrolling ala Flickr, Twitter, Facebook etc).

    1. We’ve not had any issues reported in accessibility testing with the coloured background as far as I know, but we have some more structured feedback coming through soon, so we’ll keep an eye on that.

  19. Wandsworth Road, Denmark Hill, Peckham Rye, Queeens Road Peckham are all missing from the single fare finder. Also, what happened to integration with the journey planner? There are other apps available that show routes and Oyster fares together.

  20. Horrendous… I only really use the bus countdown during the working week, and my stop has been replaced with Hail and Ride. And to top it all off the new countdown doesn’t work!! “A” for effort Tfl.

  21. For example, Richmond to Watford Junction gives me several route options:
    – London Overground to Willesden Junction, Bakerloo line to Wembley Central, Southern to Watford J
    – South West to Vauxhall, Victoria line to Euston, London Midland to Watford J
    – London Overground to Willesden J, London Overground to Watford

    There is no indication of the Oyster fare, nor any direct link single to the single fare finder page. Surely, whatever the problems with integration, I should be able to look up fares for the journey I just planned without navigating through several screens and re-entering the start and end points? Otherwise, why would I not just use Citymapper?

    By the way, trying to use the jp or the sff using a power pc Mac is nightmarish.

    1. Hi John – yes, we really wanted to get fares into Journey Planner but we had to descope this from the initial release. Now that we’ve got it out we’ll be improving the fares info and links and seeking to add them in the context of the journey you plan. Sorry about the Power PC – is it the browser or the computer? How old is it…?

      1. Firefox 3.6.28, which was the last update for Power PC in 2012. By the way, I am replying using Firefox right now and I cannot see my text or corrections as I type. I have to scroll up the page and back down again or move into another tab and back again to see what I have just done, hence the mistake in my post yesterday. All the icons are replaced by fractions of a roundel or bus icon or some other unidentifiable image, e.g. on the homepage, the roundel to the left of ‘Transport for London’ is replaced by what looks like a small part of a circular arrow logo.
        Using the last update of Safari for Power PC is ok, but I believe most Power PC users have ditched Safari because of incompatibility and reliability issues. TenFourFox (Firefox without Java) works best if you want to reccommend anything to users I think.

        1. Sorry John, but I’m not sure there’s a lot we can do on this. It really is a very old machine and browser and we have virtually no other users on this from our stats.

      2. Hello – any idea when the missing stations will be added back to the single fare finder? It is the only site / app I am aware of that even mentions route validation in order to achieve alternative fares. Without a fully functional fare finder, it is difficult to see how you can expect customers to accept paying higher default fares (e.g. Queens Road Peckham to South Kensington is default 1-2 Through fare. A touch on the route validator at Surrey Quays will set the code for a TfL only fare.) Logically, PAYG users might reasonable assume that the default fare would be TfL only since one has to pass through two sets of gates to go via Victoria, London Bridge or Blackfriars but that is not the case. Looking further ahead, I believe that the single fare finder needs to be more prominently featured until full integration with the journey planner is achieved. Your stats for single fare finder usage may be low compared to the journey planner since it was not well advertised on the old site design and the focus groups would have included many Londoners who either don’t care too much about the single fares (season ticket users, affluent customers etc) and users who aren’t even aware that alternative fares exist and / or don’t understand PAYG at all. I would respectfully suggest that contactless payment card users will be more concerned about how much they are being charged when it starts coming directly out of their bank / credit card accounts.

  22. We’re now two days in and nothing has improved – it’s clear you have launched this before it is fit for purpose. Please take it down, revert to the previous version, and when you’ve fixed the faults, think about releasing again.
    This latest version is simply unusable.

    1. It’s unlikely we’re going to agree on this, a million customers are using the site with only a handful of issues, of which a number have already been fixed. We’ll make it much better over time, but it’s already clear that it is used and accepted by most Londoners. It does occur to me that you may be getting a poorer experience than others, perhaps due to an older phone or browser – is that the case? If you are getting a device-specific problem it would be great to hear about it.

      1. Using Firefox 27.0.1 on a one year old laptop PC.
        I know I am sounding harsh – but how do you know there are only a handful of issues? I only found this link because of diamond geezer’s excellent review – I suspect many other people are struggling and don’t know who to complain to.
        The basic assumption that everyone does things “right now” on a tablet is flawed – many of us plan (or try to plan) our journeys using a PC – and you’ve made that so much harder.

      2. 0852 on Friday 28 March.
        “Road Disruptions
        Sorry, road disruption information could not be retrieved.”
        I never ever saw this message on the old site

  23. “Location” doesn’t doesn’t recognise postcodes, or many major street names such as Cheapside. Others names come up with a long list of places, scattered widely over London (first up for “Waterloo” is an obscure bus stop in Uxbridge from whch “no TfL services operate”). And if you do hit upon a stop in the area you want, the map bizarrely shows the entire route, approaching the stop as well as beyond it. But it only does this for routes serving that exact stop and not the others in the area (so for stop “K” at Waterloo you can see all the routes converging on that stop from SE London and heading off towards Bloomsbury, but no indication that any buses go to Fleet Street or where to find them)

  24. Why does TfL persist in not showing all services in central London – it is preposterous that the most direct route from Victoria to Clapham Junction would appear to be by changing at West Brompton, or Old Street to Highbury & Islington via Kings Cross. At the very least the Northern City (Moorgate-Finsbury park) and Thameslink (Farringdon – Blackfriars) should be reinstated. You are supposed to be providing an integrated transport service, not steering potential users away from certain services in some misconceived notion of competition.

    1. We don’t steer users away from services run by other operators – we have a completely even-handed approach.

      Victoria to Clapham Junction returns Southern services as the quickest right now.
      Old Street to Highbury gives First Capital Connect services on weekdays and Tubes on weekends.

      Hope that puts your mind at rest.

  25. Another vote for train running information Barnes being more relevant to your audience than that in Bangor! I would suggest listing the suburban operations first, then Inter City services operating out of London (Virgin, East Coast, East MIdlands) then those which don’t come anywhere near London.

    And when you have a list of station closures or other issues on the same line, it makes more sense to list them in line order, not alphabetical, so that all the closures in the same area are listed close to each other (if East Ham is closed, I want to know about Barking and Upney, not Earls Court and East Putney).

    1. Hi Tim, a map is probably the best way to do this for National Rail and we’ve recently got access to National Rail Enquiries API, so we will do something nicer than what we currently have, although it’s not a trivial amount of development. Also agree on station closures – some more work is needed there to make things clearer. We’re working on more personalised content, so this should help too.

  26. Tried two different searches… Picadilly to 58 Millbank (westminster) and the website took me to Bromely. Second search was from Turnham Green to Mortimer road near Kensal rise station. Website didn’t recognise the address and brought up 70 random searches dotted around London. Seems to work if you know the postcodes but many people, especially tourists will not know the postcodes of destinations for tourist hotspots. You need to fix the Planner sharpish!

  27. March 28, 2014 at 6:06 pm said:
    Sorry – my comment awaiting moderation (timing above) – ‘Surrey Quays’ should read ‘Canada Water’ – apologies

  28. Hi there. Like the new website. cleaner and well set out. speed is fine for me. Couldn’t read through all the comments to don’t know if this is was already mentioned but the bicycle route map needs sorting. The blue line path indicator covers up the road/street names so I am only able to note adjacent streets. Can you fix? Many thanks.

  29. Printing problems – details missing. Font too large – diff to scan and much paper wastage. I don’t use a smart phone and need to print out routes. Also, route combinations inconsistent. Please revert to the old system until sorted – I NEED TO USE A RELIABLE ROUTE PLANNER. Thanks

    1. Hi David, can you be more specific about your printing problems – so we can take a look. Route combinations will be exactly the same as the old site, there’s no change there as it’s the same journey planner under the skin.

      1. Thanks for your reply Phil. The problem I had printing was to do with missing words and letters. They seem to be missing at random on my paper copy. Also, the printed font was huge, possibly above 18-20 font.

  30. In Journey Planner, what’s happened to the Wizard? That was the most useful feature of the old site, and it’s disappeared. Please reinstate!
    For desktop users, the new site is bizarre – like reading a ‘large print’ book for the partially sighted. Text is huge, so not enough information is on the page, making the process slower. Could you perhaps offer a ‘classic view’ option, more like the old site?

      1. H- Phil, Yes, I can view the page on its own to work fine.

        However I can’t embed it in my own pages anymore. The serviceboard won’t load in a frame as the new site X-Frame options are blocking the site from being put in a frame. (“Refused to display ‘http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/syndication/feeds/serviceboard-fullscreen.htm’ in a frame because it set ‘X-Frame-Options’ to ‘SAMEORIGIN’.”)

      2. Working! Thanks TfL. Our staff intranet has it and I spent ages trying to fix it until I saw this comment feed a few weeks back. I’ve been following it ever since and have just seen this morning that the service update now shows up again.

  31. On the site the District line status has been saying “Good service” this morning – but there were in fact severe delays reported via twitter etc, This is extremely misleading.

  32. Just had occasion to use the new journey planner. I’m using a 21″ iMac. The amount of wasted space on the screen is incredible. The fonts are large and the use of subtle shading to indicate which of the journey options is being displayed in detail is frankly far too subtle. There’s too much vertical scrolling required, and the animated bus rolling across grass is childish and twee to the point of irritation – I last saw something like that on kids TV shows like Playbus or Playaway.

    The top 5th of the screen is given over to banners which don’t convey any additional information and just serve as visual distraction. The use of a BUS icon and the word “bus” in the results returned is deadwood. The View Details button is actually larger and more prominent than the detail of the returned result. The repeated use of icons on the left hand side showing “bus bus bus walk bus” is again dead wood. The large title at the top “Journey Results” is again deadwood repetition of the breadcrumb trail just above it and is unnecessarily large.

    You could be far more economical with your use of screen space for desktop users.

  33. How is it made for smart phones? It takes an age to enter what I want to find out and then to load anything on my phone, especially if my internet is slow because I’m on a moving train. How is it that the old site could show me a list of journeys straight away, but this one has to show me a cartoon of a bus for a minute first? When my train is about to go into a tunnel I just want to know if I’m on the fastest service!

  34. Sorry if I’ve missed a reply to this in the stream of poss above, but one of the most useful and important aspects of Journey Planner was the ability to search and plan a journey based on the postcode of your departure and destination. I used this feature almost daily! Why remove a feature that is so fundamental? Unless you live ‘at’ a tube station etc, it is now impossible to know how to get from A to B. Putting in your start point and destination via postcode or address meant you could plan any journey, particularly when either of these was unfamiliar… For example, I have a meeting at an address in an unfamiliar part of London tomorrow and as a result of this change, I have no idea how to get there using your website and cross referencing the tube map with google maps. Am I missing something obvious that will allow users to plan their journeys around anything other than their current location (if location services work) and TfL stops and stations?

    1. Ok, it’s now working, which is confusing!!! I know I’m not the only one who has commented on postcodes though so I can’t be going completely mad!

      1. Unfortunately, the service board one still does not want to run on my website. At least your website does not give error 404 when you want to see available widgets…

      2. Right.. you have a bug on your webserver which does not allow using iframe to load the widget. You need to switch off the header (or remove it at all): X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN. Otherwise there is a conflict and it will never work.

        1. Could anyone tell me what happened to the ability to see the departure boards on Tube Stations. All I have found on line is an ap for £1.99 my phone does not support AP’s whose bright idea was this?

  35. Journey Planner doesn’t work. Won’t return any results for a search either from St John’s Wood to Walthamstow or from Baker Street to Walthamstow.

  36. Hi,
    I cannot seem to get the new journey planner to work with my postcode, if I do From SE5 9RR
    To Euston today it states “”Journey planner could not find any results to your search”
    The old journey planner site still works and provides routes. Is there a problem with postcodes at the moment?
    Thanks for your help!

  37. I used the journey planner all the time on my blackberry storm. This phone is not so old and quite advanced – but every time I attempt to view anything other than the tfl homepage my browser just shuts down. Really disappointed!

    1. Hi Sara, I’m sorry the new site is not working well on your device. The Blackberry Storm was introduced in 2008 and 6 years is a long time in mobile phone technology. You would certainly get a better experience on a more modern device.

  38. Whilst the new site looks ‘nice’, there are a couple of things missing/broken that I found extremely useful on the old site – the first/last timetables for the tube/dlr which have been “Coming soon” since the new site began. I work shifts and find this information extremely useful as the journey planner doesn’t always give the most efficient results for early morning journeys. Secondly The ‘Live Departures’ box only takes me to bus departures – finding out departures from tube/dlr stations should (and used to) be quick and easy to get to.

      1. Does anyone else have the problem that the website doesn’t save ‘accessibility & travel options’ preferences even if you tick the box? The old site stopped remembering my preferences a couple of years ago, and the old site doesn’t either. This is across different platforms and browsers.

  39. Is there no longer the option to email a route? Can only see option to print.

    And why no matter how many times I enter the same bus stop name (which the old site used to recognise while being typed and auto-complete) do I have to wait for the search to return with the street name and the actual bus stop as options before I invariably click the bus stop option and then it searches the route?

  40. Journey planner is giving me very odd results lately, it’s been happening ever since the re-launch.
    For example: today I wanted to find out how long from Bond St tube to Bethnal Green, obviously all on the Central Line. Journey Planner told me I should get the Jubilee line from Bond St to Baker Street, Bakerloo line to Oxford Circus, then change to the central line to get to Bethnal Green. This is obviously far lengthier, less convenient and is the only result displayed repeatedly.
    All lines are running a good service at the moment so I can’t see why. Double checked and same results again.

    It also ignores obvious routes I am used to getting suggested, such as for Acton to Bond St: taking the 207 to Shepherd’s Bush station to get on the Central Line and proceed to Bond St.

    It often ignores very obvious Overground routes too; I have to force it to use Overground only to check timings when I realise it’s a much faster route by checking maps.

    Can’t trust it at the moment. Seems like some work still needed?

    1. DId you take into account that Central Line trains are not stopping now at Bond Street? Perhaps that is why you got lengthier results.

  41. Can’t click on links (e.g ‘plan a journey’) using a Blackberry, rendering the site completely unusable with this device!

  42. Using a mobile browser (Chrome in this case) live updates do not work at all of the stations. For example at Barking the mobile site just shows London Overground services with Barking as the destination. No platforms or other destinations are shown and it’s been like this for 2 months, despite me emailing feedback. You are also unable to request the desktop version of the site to use that instead. It’s very pretty but the live updates are pretty much useless at the moment.

  43. Yea, your JavaScript is broken on all but desktop browsers. Mobile devices are unusable. Also fire your UX designer, some of the user journeys are still awful. I like the design and this could have been an amazing site… looks really good though so coudos on that…

  44. Just tried to plan a cycle route using the TFL site. I remember it being quite a useful planner, but am now finding it all-but useless. When you click on ‘view details’, all that comes up is a google map of London. I’ve tried this on two computers now and the same result – what is happening?

        1. Hi Vicky, sadly we could not reply to every message when we launched the site, but the points of most messages were covered by other responses. Is there something outstanding that you would like to ask?

          1. There’s a question I asked months ago that’s still unresolved: ‘Save these preferences for future visits’ hasn’t worked for me for maybe three years. You said you’d look into it. What happened?

          2. Thanks for replying now, Phil. I’d like to know if there’s still an option to email routes from the journey planner. I’m not always checking on my own behalf and it would be helpful to have the option still of sending a route. It seems only print is available. Any suggestions?

          3. Hi Vicky, there’s no button for that on the website. However you can take the URL and email it – on most phones there’s a share facility which will allow you to do this. It does produce a rather long URL at the moment which is not ideal and we have a more concise sharing facility on our list of enhancements for the first quarter of 2015.

  45. Hi
    great new site BUT one excellent function of old site missing.You need to be able to email/share routes with people.
    why?
    -Need this as a parent of teens so I know their plans
    -to show visitors to London how to get around
    -as a teacher who uses TFL free transport for schools need to email my route to our administrator
    -planning trips with group of friends
    please bring it back
    many thanks

    1. Hi Yvonne, there’s no sharing button on the site but you can share the URL by email – either by copying and pasting it or by using the share function of most phones and browsers. It does produce a rather long URL I’m afraid at present. We have it in our list of enhancements to add a more concise sharing feature in the first quarter of 2015.

  46. Any idea when the single fare finder will start returning 2015 fares? At the moment whichever radio button is selected, only 2014 fares are returned.

  47. got to say it’s a rubbish upgrade, put in Watford Junction & it takes you to Watford on the Met line, can we have the old version, at least it worked

  48. There are a few things that would be really useful to see on the new site, without having to dig deep into the site:

    1. Whether planned engineering work is occurring on the trains for the journey
    2. More results so that one can work out the regularity of the service – so repeated iterations of the same service (couldn’t there be an option to select the number of results that are displayed?)
    3. How frequently the recommended buses go, whether they are every ten minutes or every twenty etc. without having to consult an individual timetable
    4. The ability to open up different sets of results on the same page to compare journeys directly

    I like the look of the new site but feel it’s very geared towards people using smart phones wanting to travel at that instant.

    1. Hi there, thanks for your comments on the site. Taking each point in turn;

      1. Journey Planner routes you round engineering works, so would not tell you that planned engineering is taking place on your route – it simply gives you a different route. We’re looking at whether, in the future, we can flag that you’ve been routed round works or disruption so you know what’s happened.
      2. You can get more results by selecting ‘later’, although they replace the results you had before.
      3. We do have this already at https://tfl.gov.uk/bus/timetable/507?fromId=490014050B for example. We’re putting in place better links to stop information from within Journey Planner shortly.
      4. This is an interesting idea and something we’ll consider.

      The site is proudly ‘mobile first’ but we are keen to make it a great experience on all devices. Many people are now planning on the move and mobile visits make up over half our usage and rising.

      1. 2. Only four results, that get replaced when you click ‘earlier’ or ‘later’, remains rubbish. Sometimes when doing a cross-London journey all four results will have different combinations of train/tube/bus, and you want to see the next set of each of those (to work out if, say, you miss one of the connections, how often the sequence repeats). The old site’s way of *adding* to the results list rather than replacing is something I *really* miss.

        2b. It doesn’t help that there’s long been a bug whereby clicking ‘earlier’ or ‘later’ messes around with any custom ‘departing’/’arriving’ time that’s been selected—sometimes it’ll decide to change the ‘departing’ time to ‘arriving’; sometimes trying to hunt around for journeys spanning midnight makes it reset to ‘arriving’ at midnight the previous day. I’ve never been able to pin this down to a specific set of causal inputs.

        3. “We do have this already at https://tfl.gov.uk/bus/timetable/507?fromId=490014050B for example.”—With all due respect, this is exactly what what Dors doesn’t want. (“without having to consult an individual timetable”) Can’t there be a simple line of text added to the ‘View Details’ view of each journey that says ‘every x minutes’ for each leg?

        My own 5. Is there any fix in sight for ‘Save these preferences for future visits’ not remembering walking speeds? It hasn’t worked for me for a good three or four years; when I pointed it out in comments on the site relaunch, you said you’d look into it and a fix would be forthcoming soon. Is it still being looked into?

        1. Rich, the bugs you mention around earlier/later and save preferences are fixed to my knowledge but if you do find any outstanding issues please let us know. I understand there are things you don’t like about how it works now, we’ll have a think about the points you’ve raised.

          1. They still don’t work for me, in different browsers (primarily current versions of Chrome and Safari, on OS X 10.9 and 10.10 and the current version of iOS).

          2. OK – it would be really helpful if you could give me step by step how you reproduce this, then I can pass to the test team to get it logged and resolved.

          3. On the preferences not being saved: I just had a play around, and it seems weirdly inconsistent. Sometimes it’ll save all the preferences apart from walking speed and ‘Search outside London’ (I changed everything, and these two were the only two that reset to the default after I closed the tab and then re-opened the site to plan another journey). But sometimes the modal preferences revert back to a previous-saved version. (I recently deselected ‘Coach’ and lo and behold, it remembered that! But it’s inconsistent now, whether it saves my random clicking around on the modal list, or whether it reverts to ‘all modes apart from coach’, ie. what it’d *previously* remembered for me.) It’s all very strange.

            The one constant appears to be that it never, ever remembers my walking speed; it always resets from ‘Fast’ to ‘Average’ on each new journey/visit. To recap, this used to work for me way back when on the previous site, but broke about three years ago and I’ve never seen it work again since, despite forlornly ticking the ‘remember preferences’ box from time to time in vain hope.

            About the weirdness with earlier/later and departure/arrival times, I’ll have a play around and see if I can reliably reproduce them.

          4. The focus on the immediacy of the site is still unhelpful. I’m sure increasing numbers of people are planning journeys on mobile devices on the go, as you say, but the ever-changing results are often inconvenient. The results seem to auto refresh, which can mean repeating steps just to see the same journey options. Going from over to under ground during a journey can mean losing the result. I often end up screen-shotting journey results now knowing this is likely to happen, which isn’t convenient – extended journey detail doesn’t fit on screen and it surely was never the point of the site. It’s often possible to get more reliable results – in both journey detail and accessibility – from the maps app on my phone using the public transport option. A site that doesn’t constantly refresh, has options to save or send results and doesn’t involve standing outside tube stations watching the little red bus spin its wheels hoping my phone doesn’t get yanked out of my hand for a journey I’ve already searched would be really helpful. This still feels like a site that requires perseverance and one not really fit for purpose for a lot of users.

  49. The problem is much more immediate, in that the part of the site dealing with Oyster accounts (topping-up and other vital things) has been unavailable for the past hour – without any comment or apology about this being posted on the home page – what is happening?

  50. Plan a Journey still does not seem to work at all with Firefox on Android as pointed out by others. Eg. entering or deleting characters in the destination field cause characters to get duplicated and the cursor moved.

    Since this update Tfl from my mobile is unusable.

  51. The Journey Planner on the site’s still totally unusable in Firefox on Android. When typing in the input boxes characters add themselves out of nowhere and seem to continuously copy and paste for no reason with each press of the onscreen keyboard.

    It’s something that’s probably only affecting a small minority of people, but it’s frustrating it only working in Chrome, as websites that would only work in Internet Explorer 6 were 10 years ago.

    1. Hi Martin, Can you let us know what phone you have and the version of Android. We’ve not been able to reproduce this problem yet on all the devices we have, but if we can pinpoint your exact setup hopefully we can find this problem and fix it.

      1. Hi Phil, I have the same problem with a Sumsung Galaxy Ace Plus using Firefox. The version of Android on this phone is 2.3. Seems to work ok on the stock Android Browser. I have had the same problem on other phones too (Samsung Galaxy Mini S3). Friends of mine also have the same problem.

  52. Not sure this is the right place to comment, but I can’t find a contact route to report problems with the website.
    There is a bug on the TfL.gov.uk front page. The link “This weekend” specifies (as of today, Oct 9) Oct 10 to Oct 11 (with no times) which apparently is interpreted as 00:00 on both days. Thus the Sunday-only closures are not included. It should specify Oct 10 00:00:00 to Oct 11 23:59:59, which is what the equivalent link on the Status Updates page does.

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