FirstGroup's useless website

Savvy_Sue

Recently I wanted to catch a different bus after work, to get to a local cinema. I know the nearest bus stop is known as 'White Tree Roundabout', and I know several routes go there, just not sure which ones. So didn't think it would be too hard to find out what time I needed to leave work in order to get there.

Wrong.

Putting White Tree Roundabout into the Destination search box gave no results. White Tree on its own gave me a school bus route, not a lot of use in August. So I tried
looking at the route map.

Fortunately I knew roughly where on the map to look, and once I had enlarged the text size to 400% I found White Tree shown as a bus stop, with four routes serving it. However, since at 400% I could not see the legend at the same time as the stop I needed, I couldn't work out which four routes would do me.

I decided to print the map. This didn't help a lot as the coloured boxes on the legend were so small that I was
still unable to match the route colours to the legend.

Eventually I used the Graphics Select Tool to separately select the legend and the area around the White Tree and paste these into a Word document. I was then able to enlarge the 'pictures' and match the colours.

I checked the timetable and worked out what time I needed to catch a bus. However, I didn't know exactly where the bus stop(s) were at my end: they are all coded but there's no map to show where they are.

Since then I have tried typing other possibible destinations into the Search box and the results appear to be entirely random. Some bus stop names work, while others don't. Some 'areas' work, and others don't. No buses serve the area where I live, and not all the buses which go to the next area along from where I live work.

So it seems to me that if I know precisely which route I want to use, I can get the information I want, but for occasional bus users, it's completely pot luck!

Voyager2002

Try the site at https://www.traveline.org.uk and use the postcodes of where you want your journey to begin and end. Usually this works...

tigermatt

I've never had a problem with First's site, but then again there are only two main services from town that come through here so everyone knows which bus to catch. Have you tried searching by area name instead of stop name as stop names might not be included in the time table, they aren't around here.

I do know that some major cities have a transport planner of their own which tells you what trains, buses etc to catch.