Retrieving arrival predictions for multiple stop points

Would it be possible to get the arrival predictions for a set of stop point id ?
The legacy api allows that and it would be nice and useful if the unified api had this possibility.

Thank you

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Anyone from the API team ?

Hi @nakkore I presume by legacy API you mean the Countdown API? You can get arrivals for a specific geographical area or an entire route from the Unified API but at present it does not support the option of getting arrivals for a specified set of stop point ids. We can consider looking at adding that functionality in future. What would be the use case for it?

yes Countdown API.
My use case is simpe: getting bus arrivals for stops that belongs to a group (of stops) defined by the user. Usually each group can be made of 2 or 3 close stops.

I hope you can add this functionality in the near future.

Thank you

The geographical hierarchy in use is opaque at best to the general user. I am a less casual user and can probably work out precisely what stops are counted as “Wood Green Underground Station” by using (I think) the Naptan id but I do not want to do that every time I want times from somewhere.

As well as allowing selection of multiple stops, might another approach be to allow users to pick a point and then specify “all stops within X metres”?

While I am on Wood Green, it is not very logical to be told “walk to Lordship Lane” to catch the 67, particularly if I am standing in Lordship Lane, as the stop is actually in Wood Green High Road and is merely called Lordship Lane. I might be better off staying just where I am as the stop in Lordship Lane, called Redvers Road, would enable me to catch .the 243, which has several miles of destinations in common with the 67. I realise that naming stops in a universally helpful way is not easy but something better really ought to be done when presenting the user with journey information. “Walk to Stop (X) in Wood Green High Road” would be better in this case.

@mjcarchive You can use the Unified API to retrieve stops within a geographical bounding box TfL Unified API. Does that answer your first point?
Where are you seeing the “walk to Lordship Lane” message? Is it presented in Journey Planner? As a N22 resident myself, I can see that’s annoying!

Theo

So someone more skilled than me could perhaps write an app which enabled the casual user to do a bespoke box of stops. Perhaps they already have. They can’t do it on the TfL Journey Planner though.

Ah yes, the message. I’ve just done a JO search for Wood Green Underground Station to Stamford Hill Broadway at 2200 on Friday.

Jny 1 (2148) - Transfer to Redvers Road, bus 243 (journey time 38 minutes)
Jny 2 (2201) - Transfer to Lordship Lane, bus 67 (journey time 24 minutes)

The difference in actual scheduled times at that time of the evening between 67 and 243 is much smaller than 14 minutes. My understanding is that the bigger gap is shown because Journey Planner adds in the gap between buses for a high frequency route (which 243 is) but not for a low frequency route (which 67 is at that time of day). This must be deliberate but it is not communicated. So the passenger may be misled into making a poor choice.

Head on later in the evening and a different form of insanity strikes, for example.

Bus 144 to Turnpike Lane Station, then bus 67 (journey time 17 minutes)

Why advise this when you can just take the 67? Note the lack of a transfer stage, so Journey Planner must be assuming I am standing at a stop served by the 144 but not the 67, that is the w/b stop in Lordship Lane - but why, given that all I specified was Wood Green Underground Station? In that case, for the 67 journey it is telling me (standing in Lordship Lane) to transfer to “Lordship Lane” which is actually not in Lordship Lane. That stop is called “Lordship Lane” because that is where north-south passengers should alight for that road but it is a poor way of identifying stops for boarding, as you only see the name of the stop once you are right next to it.

Rant over (for now)!