A system that produces clear, printable bus maps for a place — a whole town or parish (an area map), or a single point such as a shop, school or centre (a place map) — and is designed to help you keep them current as services change. It is currently a pilot.

It means the system is built and working end to end, but it has never been used in anger. Specifically, and plainly:

• We have one organisation and no income. Love’s Farm Community Association in St Neots publishes four of the maps here under its own name, and pays nothing for them. Every other map on this site was produced by us, to build and test the system.
• The example maps are ours. They are real output — nothing is mocked up — but no council or business publishes them, and they are not maintained as live travel information. Anything shown as Sample is one of these.
• There is no service level. No uptime promise, no response times, no guarantee the monthly refresh happens on time. It is run by one person alongside other work.
• Things may change or stop. We may alter how it works, pause it, or withdraw it. We would give reasonable notice and you would keep the maps you had already downloaded.

What is not provisional: the maps themselves are built from official open data and reviewed by a person before publication. The pilot label is about the service around them, not about the care taken over them.

This is also exactly the phase where feedback on the tools and the experience is most useful — what's confusing, what's missing, what would make you trust this in front of your own committee. Tell us. A mistake on a specific map has its own quicker route: the "Spotted a problem?" form on that map's own page.

When we have organisations using it and a track record to point at, this notice and the banner at the top of every page come off.

Any organisation whose community uses the bus: councils, shops, businesses, schools, event organisers, charities, attractions and more. Every application is reviewed and approved before an account is set up. During the pilot we are looking for a small number of organisations willing to try it and tell us what is wrong with it.

That includes organisations with a politics — a party, a campaign group, a councillor’s office. We are non-partisan, which is a rule about us rather than a test applied to you.

BusMaps.uk is non-partisan, and any organisation whose community uses the bus may publish a map — a political party, a campaign group or a councillor’s office included. We do not decline an organisation because of its politics and we do not favour one. Buses are an ordinary thing that people of every persuasion get on, and an organisation that wants to tell its community where they go is doing something useful whoever it is.

What makes that workable is that there is nothing political inside a map to argue about. A map is drawn from the Bus Open Data Service and OpenStreetMap by ordinary code — it shows the services that exist, on the days they run, and nothing else. It carries the publishing organisation’s name and badge and nobody else’s. There is no editorial line on a bus map, and no room for one.

Two conditions come with a published map, and they are the same for everybody. The credits stay on it and the map is not altered — already in our terms, because the open data licences require the attribution to travel with the map. So adding any logo to a printed map, a party’s or anyone else’s, is an alteration we do not allow, and that rule was there before the question came up.

We should be plain about the limit of this. A published map is a public download: anyone may print one and put it where they like, and we have no say in that. What we can do is make sure a reader can always see whose map it is — the credits along the bottom, and the publishing organisation’s badge where a map has one. A map printed from this site and displayed by somebody else is still that organisation’s map, or, while it carries our own pilot band, still ours.

It can contribute to both, and it is worth being precise about how far. An Enhanced Partnership scheme may require that a single set of multi-operator information is available across all operators; a map showing every operator’s services in one area, kept current and published on a page anyone can read, is that artefact for the area it covers.

A bus network accessibility plan — which every local transport authority must publish by 1 April 2027 — assesses more than bus stop infrastructure. Its recommended rating scale covers nine parts of the network, and three of them are exactly what we hold: information and journey planning, network design and service availability, and signage and at-stop information; its scope also requires the plan to cover the information and ticketing services running on those routes. What we do not hold is the infrastructure audit itself — shelters, kerbs, lighting — and we would rather say so now than at the point you find out.

National policy on passenger information is now firmly digital — open data, real-time feeds, journey planners — and for most journeys that is the right default. It leaves two groups out. People without a smartphone, without data, or without the confidence to use a journey planner are disproportionately the people who depend on the bus. And nobody searches for a bus they don’t know exists: an app answers a question you knew to ask, a map on a noticeboard tells you the question.

For a door-to-door journey you have already decided on, Google Maps, Moovit and Transit will all plan it, and for times on the day the operator or bustimes.org is the place to look. What none of them does is show the whole network at once, on a wall, to someone who has not decided anything yet.

That argument is ours rather than the government’s, and we would rather state it plainly than imply it has official backing.

Nothing. It is free during the pilot. We may introduce charges in future, but always with notice — you would never be billed by surprise. Our pricing page explains what you would be buying and how a price would be worked out, if and when there is one.

Because towns differ enormously in how hard they are to draw. Before the expensive work starts, the system scores the area — how many services run, how tightly they bunch in the centre, how much of the network ends up hidden under other lines — and returns green, amber or red. A red town takes several times the work of a green one, so a quote would be based on that score rather than on a guess. You can see a red town and what we do about it on the examples page.

To start with, each organisation can have one area and a few places. Each map is approved individually. We would expect to raise these limits once the pilot has run its course.

You can choose which of the standard outputs you want, recolour and relabel routes, turn landmarks on or off, and accept the monthly updates — then download print-ready files. The more delicate layout work (straightening lines, nudging labels) we do for you, so the result reads properly in print.

An internal geographic map (drawn to the streets), an internal schematic (straightened and tidied), an external map showing where the buses go, and a where-to-board plan for a bus station or town centre. You pick which ones you want for each map — except the boarding plan, which is asked for rather than switched on.

The other three maps answer where do the buses go. This one answers the opposite question, the one you actually have while standing in a bus station: I have decided to go to Bedford — which of these five identically-named stops do I wait at?

It is a large-scale plan of one place — a bus station, an interchange, a town-centre street — with an index of the places you can reach from it, listed alphabetically by destination rather than by route number. Each row names the stop to stand at, how far it is, and which services run there. Every stop letter is printed straight from NaPTAN, the Department for Transport's national stop register, so the letter on the map is the letter on the flag in the street. We do not invent one.

That last rule is also its limit. Stop lettering is each transport authority's own policy, not a national standard: some letter their town-centre streets in one series, others letter only their bus stations, and some letter nothing at all. Where the stops around a place cannot each be named unambiguously, the map declines to be produced rather than guess — so it is asked for and checked for a given place rather than switched on. It also reads as a companion to the area map at a town-centre stop, not a replacement: buses that stay inside the town have no destination to index, and on a busy High Street that can be a quarter of the traffic.

The intention is a refresh from official data every month, and that is how the system is built to work — though during the pilot the cadence is not guaranteed. When something changes on your routes, you’ll see “a change to review”, preview it, and accept it — your colours and labels carry over automatically.

Bus routes, stops and timetables come from the UK Bus Open Data Service (BODS), published under the Open Government Licence. Streets, rivers and landmarks come from OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL). Live times should always be checked with the operator or at bustimes.org.

Check three things in order, because most “missing” places turn out not to be missing.

1. Is it already there, or hidden? Every place on a map comes from OpenStreetMap, the first draft has more of them than will fit, and each one is then shown, shown if there is room, or left off. If you are the organisation behind the map, open Landmarks in the editor: if the place is listed, mark it Must show, save, and the next version draws it. If you are a reader rather than the organisation, use the “Spotted a problem?” form on the map’s own page and say which place, and why people use it to find their way.

2. Is it a kind of place we draw? Town maps show supermarkets, doctors’ surgeries, pharmacies, hospitals, libraries, museums, theatres, schools, leisure centres, parks, community centres and town halls — the places people say “get off at”. Pubs, cafés, individual shops and offices are not drawn, however well known, because a map that shows them has no room left for the buses. If you think a category is missing, tell us: a town where a category mattered is how the list has grown.

3. Is it on OpenStreetMap at all? If a place of a kind we draw is not offered under Landmarks, OpenStreetMap does not have it, or has it under a different category or without its name. The fix is to add or correct it there, and it reaches your map on the next monthly update, listed as a new place for you to answer. Anyone can do this: OpenStreetMap’s Beginners’ Guide walks through making an account and adding a place, and if you would rather not edit, you can leave a note on the map without an account, saying what is missing, and a local mapper will usually pick it up. The same route removes a place that has closed. Correcting OpenStreetMap improves every map made from it, not only yours.

Not to make decisions about your map. The maps themselves are deterministic: the geographic, schematic and external outputs are drawn straight from the BODS and OpenStreetMap data by ordinary code, with no AI involved and no network call made at the moment a map is generated — the same data always produces the same map. And every map, whichever outputs it uses, is checked by a person before it can be published.

Where AI has been involved is in building the software itself — it was written with the help of an AI coding assistant, the same as a growing share of software generally is. That is a statement about how the code was written, not about how your map gets drawn.

Yes. Once a version is reviewed, it gets a page on our public site — the maps to view or download, your organisation’s name, badge, colour and website, and a form so readers can tell you if something looks wrong. It also appears in our published maps gallery. You control your public details, and you can take a map off the public site with one tick without affecting your own copies.

Yes — every map is produced as a print-ready A4 sheet at 300 dpi (and as an SVG), sized and coloured for real printing. As the organisation behind a map, you can always download it clean for real printing. If you wish it, downloads by anyone else are watermarked, so the print-ready original stays yours to hand out. Once it is printed, where you put it up matters as much as what you printed.

How high. Fix the sheet so the whole of it sits between 900 mm and 1800 mm above the ground. The Department for Transport’s Inclusive Mobility guidance asks for a detailed sign — a timetable, a map, a diagram — to be centred about 1400 mm up, which for an A4 sheet puts its middle at roughly chest height for a standing adult. Lower is better than higher: a wheelchair user, a child, or anyone shorter than the person holding the drill has to be able to get close enough to read small type, and the QR code in the bottom corner is how the paper reaches the text version of itself. If there is room, put two up. The same guidance recommends duplicating a detailed sign — one centred 1600–1700 mm for people standing, one centred 1000–1100 mm for people seated. That is an expensive recommendation for a council and a free one for you, because printing our sheets costs nothing.

Whose wall is it. Ask the owner of the shelter, post or board before you fix anything to it. A bus shelter is usually the town or parish council’s, sometimes the district council’s, and sometimes an advertising contractor’s under a maintenance contract — your council can tell you which. It matters because fly-posting means a display put up without the consent of the owner or occupier: consent is what separates the two, so ask, and ask at the same time whether anything further is needed. Our licence lets your organisation reproduce and display the map as much as it likes; what it cannot do is give you permission over somebody else’s property.

What to print it on. A4 or larger, on matt paper rather than glossy — the same guidance asks for a matt finish and good contrast, because glare and rain on a shiny surface are what make a timetable unreadable outdoors. If the sheet is going outside, put it behind glass or in a weatherproof frame.

No. A person reviews every map before it can be printed — a check that it looks right, not an independent verification against timetables — and we build only from official open data. Routes and times still change, and this is a pilot with no warranty behind it. These maps are a guide: please encourage readers to confirm live times before travelling.

We use them only to consider your application and to set up and support your maps. We don’t sell them or use them for anything else, and you can ask us to delete them.