BUS

About this site

how the figures are worked out

← all routes

What this is

An independent record of how 27 Sydney bus routes are actually running, published as 53 boards — usually one for each direction of a route, so the run into town and the run home are judged separately. It is built from the public realtime feed and has no connection to the operator or to Transport for NSW.

Every trip on a tracked route gets a row, every day, showing how far ahead or behind the timetable the bus was at a handful of stops along the way. Nothing is averaged away: you can see the individual bus.

Where the data comes from

Two feeds published by Transport for NSW on the Open Data Hub, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence:

• The timetable (GTFS) — every scheduled trip, its stops and its booked times. This is what “late” is measured against.
• The realtime feed (GTFS‑Realtime trip updates and vehicle positions) — where each bus is, how far off its booked time, and how full it is.

Both are Sydney‑wide. This site keeps only the routes it tracks.

How often it updates

What “late” means

The realtime feed reports each bus against its booked time at each stop. A cell shows that difference at one checkpoint: +2:30 is two and a half minutes behind, -1:00 is a minute early, on time is exactly to the second.

Colour runs from early through to very late, so a row can be read at a glance without reading the numbers.

Only what was actually observed

The feed also predicts times for stops the bus has not reached. Those predictions are not shown. A stop appears only once the bus has genuinely passed it — which is knowable because the feed drops a stop from a trip once it is behind the bus.

So a bus still on the road shows a partial row, filling in as it goes. That is by design, not missing data.

Which stops are shown

Five to seven per board, not every stop. They are taken from the timing points the timetable itself marks — the stations, interchanges and named stops it publishes real times for — and spread along the run so the row tells the story of the journey.

A blank cell on a completed trip usually means that trip did not serve that stop. Several routes run short workings that start or finish part way along, and they are shown on the same board as the full run rather than hidden.

The two percentages

On time counts only trips that finished, and asks whether the bus arrived within 3 minutes of its booked time at the stop that board is scored on — normally the last checkpoint the trip reaches, which is where its passengers get off.

On a few boards it is read one stop earlier, and deliberately so. A trip’s very last stop is the one place the feed can never confirm: the whole trip disappears when it finishes, rather than the stop dropping out, so the figure recorded there is the last prediction standing. Roughly one time in fifty that prediction is nonsense. Where the second‑last stop is close by, that is used instead.

No‑show is the share of trips that were due and never appeared, out of those whose fate is settled — no-shows ÷ (completed + no-shows). Trips still to come, or still running, are in neither half, so the figure does not swing about during the day.

What each status means

Status	Meaning
RAN	Finished. Seen at every checkpoint through to its last.
ACTIVE	Out on the road now. Cells fill in as it passes each stop.
PARTIAL	Seen at some stops, then lost before the end — the feed stopped reporting it. What was observed is shown; the rest stays blank.
PENDING	Not due yet.
NO-SHOW	Due, and no sign of it in the feed at any stop.
UNTRACKED	Due before this board started watching — a new board, or a gap in the tracking. Counted as neither run nor missed, because nobody was looking.

What it cannot tell you

• A NO-SHOW means the feed carried no trace of that bus. Usually that means it did not run — but a bus that ran without reporting looks identical from here.
• Figures are only as good as the feed. Where it publishes something implausible, that is shown rather than quietly corrected, except at the last stop as described above.
• These are not official performance measures, and the operator measures punctuality its own way. Nothing here should be used to plan a trip — use the official apps for that.