How to read the map

Quick start

1. 1
   Pick a view. Choose Toowong, Carina or All at the top of the panel. All shows every Brisbane City Council bus route.
2. 2
   Click a group in the list, such as 38x, to zoom to it and fade the others. Click it again to zoom back out.
3. 3
   Hover or click a route number such as 411 to see its path and only the stops it serves.
4. 4
   Zoom in and point at any stop to see which routes call there and how often.

The panel

Depot

Toowong and Carina show the routes on each depot's list. All shows every Brisbane City Council bus route, about 220 of them in 40-odd groups. The choice is saved in the web address, so a link ending in #carina or #all opens straight to that view. The browser's Back button steps between views.

View and toggles

Zones

Coloured areas: the part of the city each group serves.

Routes

Each route's main path, coloured by group.

Both

Zones, slightly faded, with the routes on top.

Hub spokes

Lines from each group to a hub such as UQ, thicker for more visits. Off to start with.

Shared corridors

Grey areas where no single group dominates, and the lightly shaded city centre.

Labels

The street map's own suburb, street and place names, drawn on top of the zones so they stay readable.

Map: Auto / Day / Night

The map's palette: a daytime or night-time street map, with zone and route colours tuned to suit each. Auto follows your device's light or dark setting. The panel always follows your device. The site remembers your choice.

Colour / Grey

Turns the street map grey so the zones and routes stand out. The zones keep their colours.

Hubs

A hub is a place where many groups meet outside the city centre, such as UQ for Toowong, or Woolloongabba and Carindale for Carina. Click a hub to open it and see how many times each group stops there on a weekday, plus a Show on map button. Pointing at a hub's heading highlights the groups that serve it and draws their spokes.

Families and groups

• Families group the hundreds together (300s, 400s…). Click a family's heading to fold it away; the site remembers what you folded. Point at a heading to preview that whole family on the map.
• Groups show the prefix, the area it serves and its weekday trip total. Click a group to zoom to it: its full corridor is shaded (main paths stronger than variants) and the other groups fade. Click again, or fold its family, to zoom back out. Clicking a coloured zone on the map does the same.
• Route numbers: point at one to preview it, or click to pin it and zoom in. Click again to unpin.

The map

A highlighted route

Pointing at things

On a phone

• The panel folds down to a slim bar along the bottom, so the map gets the whole screen. The bar shows the depot, or the group or route you've picked.
• Tap the bar (or swipe it up) for the legend and options. Tap it again, swipe it down, or tap the map above it to close it.
• Picking a group or a route closes the sheet so you see the result straight away. The × on the bar clears the selection.
• There's no hovering on a touch screen, so tap a stop. Its pop-up lists the routes as buttons; tap one to highlight that route.
• Tapping a family or hub heading folds or opens it.
• The panel follows your phone's light or dark setting. The map does too, unless you pick Day or Night for it.

How zones are worked out

Everything is calculated from Translink's timetable for one typical weekday, shown at the bottom of the panel.

1. Groups. A route belongs to the group of its first two digits: 380, 381 and N385 are all 38x. Routes numbered under 100 (29, 61, 77…) are each a group of their own.
2. Who owns a stop. For every stop, count the weekday trips from each group. If one group runs 60% or more of them, the stop is that group's. Otherwise it's shared and shown grey.
3. City and hubs left out. Stops within 1.7 km of the Queen Street Mall, and hub stops such as UQ, are left out of the zones. Every group passes through them, so they'd only blur where the routes really start.
4. From stops to areas. Each stop gets the area that's closer to it than to any other stop, but no more than 400 m away, about a five-minute walk. A group's zone is all of its stops' areas joined up.
5. Main paths and variants. A path used by at least 15% of a route's trips in one direction is a main path; anything less is a variant.

Which group owns a stop depends on which routes are counted, so a stop shared in the All view can belong to one group in a depot view, and the other way round.

Colours

In Toowong and Carina, each group has its own hand-picked colour, chosen so neighbouring zones are easy to tell apart:

In All, with over 40 groups, each hundred gets its own family of colours instead, so you can see at a glance which part of the city a route belongs to:

So the same group can look different in a depot view and in All.

What it doesn't show

• School (7xx) and special (9xx) runs. They aren't in Translink's main timetable feed. Note that the 7xx numbers in the feed are Gold Coast routes.
• Weekends and nights. Trip counts are for one weekday. NightLink routes (N…) appear in their group but mostly don't run on a weekday.
• Which depot runs each trip. The timetable doesn't say. Depot views come from each depot's route list, and a route worked by two depots appears in both.
• Older phones. The street map needs WebGL. Devices without it get a simpler map traced from the bus, train and ferry paths in the timetable instead.

Data & credits

Built from the Translink SEQ GTFS timetable feed, licensed CC BY 4.0. Street map © OpenStreetMap contributors, served by OpenFreeMap (OpenMapTiles) in its Liberty style. Drawn with Leaflet and MapLibre GL. The map is rebuilt whenever the site is updated, from the latest feed at the time.

Bus RADS is an unofficial drivers' tool. It isn't affiliated with Brisbane City Council or Translink. For journey planning, use Translink's journey planner.