Mike Roberts" wrote in message
...
On 03/07/16 12:54, MikeS wrote:
Having tired with the frustration of using TfL's new "improved" journey
planner for bus arrivals I decided to develop my own application. This
has progressed to the stage of searching for bus stops by name. You have
to find your own solution as the API does not provide a direct way to do
it (or anyway I cannot find it). I have been looking for a bug because
my application often gives very different results to the same search
with the TfL journey planner but I now realise I am correct and the Tfl
web site is wrong.
For example, if you search for a stop called Abbey Road TfL will usually
return a pair of stops on route 31 although it sometimes suggests a
couple of other stops with Abbey Road included in the stop name. My
application returns a total of 7 stops called "Abbey Road" served by 10
more bus routes (57, 112, 131, 152, 187, 200, 219, 226, B11). Using the
journey planner to search for each of those routes reveals that every
one does indeed have a stop called Abbey Road for which it returns the
same bus arrivals as my application.
It seems as if the TfL programmer assumed every stop in London has a
unique name (as opposed to stop or Naptan code) and therefore returned
only the first hit from a search (31 is the smallest nuber in the list).
It seems inconceivable that the TfL developers have not tested this
aspect of the search engine but they should either fix it immediately or
withdraw it. Given the way many people must use the planner, especially
visitors to London, it is irresponsible to leave it as it is.
You are right. I had trouble getting the JP to find "The Broadway",
Stanmore. I had to pick it out from the map.
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Interesting. I just searched The Broadway in the JP and it did find Stanmore
(142) but not the ones in Epping (167) and Wood Green (184). Note that as I
mentioned earlier it only returned the stops for the lowest route number
(142 this time).