StopPoint ID question

Unified API
1

Hello, I’m brand new to the TFL API, what a great resource!

I was trying to access data about arrivals to a local bus station, Lordship Road, so I accessed StopPoint/Search?query=lordship%20road, which returned one result with an ID of 490G00009365. But searching Line/106/Arrivals/490G00009365 returned nothing.

Browsing through the more general Line/106/Arrivals endpoint showed that the stop I’m interested in had a different ID, 490009365W. Using this ID, I was able to get the arrival information I expected.

I’m trying to understand what these different IDs mean. I did see this blog post and an old forum question, which explained why a ‘hub’ might not work as expected. But this stop isn’t a hub. What am I missing?

2

Hello and welcome to the forum!

490G00009365 is a bus stop pair, i.e. a group of two bus stops usually on opposite sides of the road that are served by the same routes but in opposite directions. You can tell it’s a group because the fourth character in the code is a “G”.

If you make a request to:
https://api.tfl.gov.uk/StopPoint/490G00009365
…you can check the children property and see that it contains two bus stops:

You can tell that these are individual bus stops because the fourth character in the code is a “0”.

The /StopPoint/{id}/Arrivals endpoint only works for individual stops, and not groups of stops.

In case it’s of use, here is my reply to a similar question from someone else:

Please let me know if you have any further questions.

1 Like
3

Ah fanstatic! I knew it had to be something like that. That makes perfect sense. Thank you!