Anybody else finding that the journey planner Plan a journey - Transport for London is currently delivering only bus journeys?
Or, with bus unticked and everything else selected, it’s giving no results at all?
Strange, its working on my mobile but not on desktop
Same problems here on my W10 PC, but it is working normally on my Android tablet.
Yes, this is still the case for me. The API’s all seem fine, I think it’s something that is being filtered out on the front-end (the journeys are coming back, but they are just not being shown). Interesting that this has been broken for at least 5 days with no action. (Like the map views in the bus section which hasn’t worked for years).
Are you using firefox? This seems to be caused by a firefox addon, though I’ve not yet identified which one. However, if I restart firefox with addons disabled (an option in the help menu), I get trains in the result.
So, I suspect unlikely to be a TFL bug.
Useful info. It wasn’t working for me in Chrome, but quickly fired up incognito to get all my plugins turned off and it worked. I only have an ad blocker and privacy badger installed, so might be one of those.
I tried in a firefox 65.0.1 without any extensions (in a virtual machine), I got the same result until I reduced my “Content Blocking” (in Preferences/“Privacy & Security”) from custom (with some quite strict choices) to standard,
In my standard browser (Firefox 60 with several privacy&security-enhancing extensions I can’t even see the options for selecting travel time without allowing javascript from google.com. Also no results at all are shown without javascript from there. Almost all the reasons google can have to host scripts on there rather than e.g. gstatic.com comes down to their ability to track us, i.e. it’s bad.
Yes, I found the same but have not yet had time to report back.
The problem is unrelated to any of my firefox addons. It occurs with these totally standard and wholly desirable settings:
Adding tfl,gov.uk to the exceptions list does not change anything. The problem is almost certainly the result of google’s despicable and wholly unnecessary spyware.
I did manage to establish that the command sent to the server was identical with and without tracking protection. In the web console, the “missing” train journeys can be seen within the server’s response. So the server is behaving properly – its the client that is somehow improperly suppressing display of the information when tracking is disabled.
The display problem does not affect bus journeys so there must be some difference in the display of the train journeys which is causing this bug.
TFL should urgently investigate this problem and find a way to ensure that full results are displayed, not just with the basic protection but even when tracking protection is set to “strict”.
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I found that Kaspersky Internet Security was blocking the results.
Allowing data collection on the site has got things working normally again.
The fault here is not that firefox and kaspersky are blocking the results, but that TFL is causing or allowing undesirable information, probably spyware and tracking, to be transmitted in a manner that requires that data to be blocked. It’s also unlikely that firefox and kaspersky are both independently blocking a false positive. They are doing so because there is something happening behind the scenes which is unnecessary and undesirable.
Thus, telling people to reconfigure their browsers and reduce their security isn’t the answer. The proper answer is to get rid of the spyware. If that means getting rid of all third party code, especially google, so much the better. It should be possible to replace most of it with with spyware-free open source code, properly hosted on tfl’s own servers to ensure nothing is transmitted to third parties, so much the better.
Its acceptable that TFL would want to do its own anonymous tracking to help planning and improve the software, but all tracking ceases to be anonymous the moment google gets involved. For this reason, there should be no google code or services on any government or public service web site unless that site provides an anonymising proxy to prevent google getting the user’s IP address or being able to cross-identify the user in any other way.
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that TFL is causing or allowing undesirable information, probably spyware and tracking, to be transmitted in a manner that requires that data to be blocked.
As a user of the TfL API and not an employee of TfL, then I would very politely suggest that you’re going to have to do more than assert the above.
Playing Devil’s Advocate, I’m going to say please show me:
- What actual undesirable information you are referring to;
- What Spyware has been caused or allowed to be used;
- What tracking has been caused or allowed;
- Why that requires something to be blocked;
If you can show the above is true, is any of it breaking the Tfl Privacy & cookies Policy ?
If you can do this, there is a route to a compaint.
If you can’t then TfL will no doubt regard the breaking of their service by a third party system to be Somebody else’s problem
Thanks.
It’s calls to assets.adobedtm.com that are the problem.
Unblock that domain, in DNS and/or adblock and/or your privacy tool, and my identical issue was resolved.
I was about to try that solution, but I notice it’s not currently a problem in firefox – ie, the train and tube journeys are back in the results.
I don’t know whether that means TFL has changed something in that file to fix it, or whether firefox or one of its addons has done an update to avoid the problem.
But it begs the question, why couldn’t it be properly hosted as a subdomain of tfl.com and therefore make it less likely to be treated as suspicious in the first place.
But it begs the question, why couldn’t it be properly hosted as a subdomain of tfl.com and therefore make it less likely to be treated as suspicious in the first place.
Agreed.
Re: Firefox,I’m on current version 66.0.2, and if you click the green padlock symbol in the address bar, and configure the content blocking to e.g. strict, Firefox itself blocks the adobedtm domain. I have set a custom rule to allow it.
Perhaps because it’s an Adobe product and can’t be hosted by the UK government?