What happened to my bus?

Stagecoach buses are usually fairly good at reporting their position and route number - but this can be one of the things that goes wrong on a bus - so it's best not to rely completely on any information you may find out from the methods described on this page.

Moffat & Williamson and Bay Travel are also gradually adding location tracking to their buses.

If you click on the map below you should see a map of current Stagecoach bus positions in Fife - this should help you to see the approach of your bus - or tell you if you have just missed it. This is particularly useful if buses are having problems reporting their route number.

Stagecoach and Traveline Scotland (they have a new local rate number - 0141 465 1878) provide web services and apps which let you look at expected bus times and try to help you work out when the next bus is due to arrive at a stop - but they don't always see the overall picture of what's going on with buses.

I've found bustimes.org to be a useful service for seeing what's happening with buses - it's also usually useful for tracking back to see what happened over the past few months - answering questions about which vehicle was used for a given journey and what time it got to various points on its route, and did it actually follow its planned route?

But beware that the timetables on bustimes.org can be wrong! The data that bustimes.org use comes ultimately from the bus operator - but people can make mistakes when entering complex timetables into computer systems. Unfortunately, the true test of what timetable buses are actually operating is only determined by seeing the timing of real journeys - this is what you can do by following what happened on previous days...

Bus Times pages do depend on the machine in the bus correctly reporting the route number and being switched on to broadcast GPS position - and on the bustimes.org website having the matching timetables loaded into its database.

Stagecoach in Fife buses are usually quite good - but buses sometimes don't report their correct route number, start time or destination. Multiple journeys can be merged into a single set of overlapping data... (sometimes tagged onto a previous day's journey or a time that hasn't happened yet).

Not all Moffat & Williamson buses have location tracking fitted - and they don't always report the official route number for the journey. It's common to see buses running as 92A, 92B, 92C or 92D reported as plain "92" on the Bus Times map - but the map of where buses are can still be quite useful.

Not all Bus Times pages are easy to find, so here are some useful starting points:

A general map of live bus positions in the East Neuk: https://bustimes.org/map#10/56.2607/-2.9742
A list of Bus Routes operated by Stagecoach in Fife: https://bustimes.org/operators/stagecoach-east-scotland

To find out what happened to buses in previous journeys you need to check which vehicles were used to run the services.

These are the links to some of the routes you might be interested in:

Beware that since the recent timetable change the X58 and X60 routes share buses - and the drivers don't always remember to change the route number on the ticket machine in St Andrews - so the vehicle tracking maps and information may well show these buses with the wrong route number! (This was a major problem in the first week or so of the new timetable - things have got a lot better since then with most route numbers reported correctly - but it's still something to look out for.)

Clicking on the Map icon representing a bus will tell you details about the vehicle and the time its position was reported.

Click on the "Timetables" tab for the timetables for each of these buses and on the Timetables tab there is a "Map" button which takes you to a map of the route and all the buses currently running as that route number.

There is a general list of all recently active Stagecoach in Fife vehicles at: https://bustimes.org/operators/stagecoach-east-scotland/vehicles - this can be quite useful if you either spot a bus and see its registration number, or you have a ticket which gives the "Bus" number - search on this page for that bus and you can find out where it's been and when...

If you are ever looking to find out who owns a bus then Flickr is a useful site to search for the registration number - it seems to be the "go to" place for bus spotters...

The "Flickr" link on Bus Times will let you see what type of bus it is and give you an idea of how many seats there are - if small single deck buses are running on the 95 it can mean that there are demands elsewhere in the bus network (faulty buses or major events) and at busy times that can mean buses risk being full.

For ideas on how to avoid being late, see our How To Catch a Bus page.

The historic travel pages and their "Map" buttons allow you to check which vehicle did which journey, what route it took and what time it passed various reported points.

Clicking on the date will let you choose the vehicles for a previous day up to around a year ago - though there may be some dates where the data has been lost.

All useful information if you want to complain about or compliment particular journeys.

If you need it, the email contact for Stagecoach in Fife is: eastscotland.enquiries@stagecoachbus.com

Or their twitter feed is at: https://twitter.com/StagecoachEScot - see our Twitter guide for suggestions on how to search for just the posts you want...

You can also phone the Stagecoach contact line on: 0345 241 8000

If you are looking for Scottish Citylink or Megabus coaches then the megabus CoachTracker is an alternative way to hunt down live bus positions.

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