How StopBoard Went from One Bus Stop in Liverpool to Every Bus Stop in Great Britain
In May 2026, I was standing at a bus stop in Liverpool, wondering if my bus was actually coming.
The existing apps were slow, cluttered, or wanted me to download something. I just wanted a simple answer: how many minutes until the next bus, and is it running late? So I built one. A website, no app download needed, that shows real-time bus arrivals for your stop. Clean, fast, honest.
I called it StopBoard. It started covering Liverpool. Then the North West. Then, on a Saturday evening in August, I flipped the switch and it went national.
Starting in Liverpool
The first version of StopBoard covered Liverpool only. A handful of stops I used myself, tested on my own commute. I shared it on Reddit, and overnight the traffic jumped 20x. People started using it daily. Some came back every morning for their commute. One user from Cumbria sent feedback within hours.
For a free side project built by one person, it felt like proof that this was worth doing.
Expanding across the North West
The data feed I was using already covered the entire North West of England. Every stop from Carlisle to Crewe was sitting in the same file. So widening from Liverpool to the full region was a natural next step.
Suddenly StopBoard had 36,000 bus stops. Google started sending people to the site without me doing any SEO work at all. By June, around 50 people were using it daily.
The question became obvious: if this works for the North West, why not everywhere?
The failed first attempt at going national
In late June, I tried to go national. The numbers were daunting. Going from the North West to all of Great Britain meant handling 12 times more data. From 5 million scheduled departure records to nearly 56 million. From 36,000 bus stops to over 309,000.
My server couldn't handle it. It ran out of memory and crashed. I spent weeks trying to build a clever workaround, a system that would only track buses when someone actually searched for them. It was elegant in theory. In practice, it gave wrong answers. Buses appeared at the wrong stops. The data was unreliable.
I scrapped the whole thing.
What actually worked
The breakthrough came when I stopped trying to be clever and started looking at the actual problem. The server wasn't running out of memory because there was too much data. It was running out because one component was loading far more information than it needed.
The fix took an afternoon. I capped that component, memory dropped by almost half, and suddenly the server could handle the entire country.
On August 1st, I changed one line of configuration to point at the national data feed instead of the regional one. Twenty-one minutes later, every bus stop in Great Britain was live on StopBoard.
After months of planning, failed experiments, and dead ends, the national launch came down to changing a single line.
What StopBoard shows you
When you search for a bus stop, you see:
Scheduled departures for every stop in England, Scotland, and Wales. These come from the official timetable data published by the UK's Bus Open Data Service and national transport bodies.
Live tracking for buses in England. If a bus is being tracked in real time, you'll see how many stops away it is, an estimated arrival time, whether it's running early or late, and its position on a map. If the live data looks stale or unreliable, StopBoard tells you that too, rather than showing you a confident answer it can't back up.
Scotland and Wales have scheduled timetable data today. Live tracking will follow as real-time data feeds become available.
The numbers
StopBoard now covers:
- 309,203 bus stops across Great Britain
- 55.8 million scheduled departures
- Around 13,000 buses tracked live at peak times
- Every bus operator publishing data through the national open data feeds
It runs on a single server. There's no company behind it, no investors, no ads. Just one developer who wanted to know when his bus was coming.
What's next
StopBoard is free and always will be. No account needed, no app to download. Just go to stopboard.uk, search for your stop, and see what's coming.
If you find it useful, tell someone. The best way to help is to share it with someone who catches the bus.
Built in Liverpool. Powered by open data from the UK Department for Transport's Bus Open Data Service.