Transport for Cornwall new website and app - disappointing to say the least
9 January 2025

For nearly three years, the Transport for Cornwall partnership has been promising that "we will be working to bring all your essential travel information together in one place with a website and app”.

Today, 9 January 2025, is the day when the new Transport for Cornwall website went live. Unfortunately, it is, to say the least, disappointing. It is, in essence, the Go Cornwall Bus website rebranded as Transport for Cornwall with the addition of timetables from First Bus tacked on to it. At the same time, the Go Cornwall Bus website no longer exists and if you type in the URL www.gocornwallbus.co.uk, you are automatically redirected to the TfC website. This is the reverse of what the situation was yesterday when the TfC website was a redirect to the GCB website.

The new site has errors and omissions, and links that do not work. A few examples of the problems:

Stagecoach, which operates services in Cornwall such as Bude to Okehampton, and Plymouth to Saltash, and is within the Transport for Cornwall partnership - its services are not listed on the new website.
However, Travel Cornwall is listed as a partner despite the fact that the Travel Cornwall scheduled services were taken over by Go Cornwall Bus in November 2024 and the company who operated the brand of Travel Cornwall, Summercourt Travel Ltd., went into liquidation in early January.

Live departure times and Directions; these features seem to work ok when accessing the website from an iphone or iPad but do not work from my desktop MacOS machine. I don’t know if they work on Windows or Android systems.

Fares: there is no listing of the single and return fares on the site. All it says is, "All single journeys within Cornwall cost no more than £3” with no indication of what the fare might be for a short journey. For return journeys, the website says, "Use your return ticket on any bus in the county” with no indication that returns now cost twice a single fare and there is no point in buying a return (see fare rises). The page says, "Thanks to £23.5m of government funding for the country’s first Bus Fares Pilot (BFP), that temporarily reduces fares to encourage people to travel more often, making them great value” without explaining that the Bus Fares Pilot money is virtually all gone and that most fares are now more than they were before the BFP started (see new fares).

Timetables: there is a link to the comprehensive timetable book for all services as published on 1 September 2024. Then there is also a list of services in a similar format to what was on the Go Cornwall Bus website plus First’s services are tacked on to the end of the list (and not Stagecoach routes). On some routes, daytime services are run commercially by First and evening and Sunday services are run by Go Cornwall Bus on a subsidised basis. Whereas the comprehensive timetable book has generally combined the two operators’ timetables into one cohesive whole, the route by route listing on the website shows them separately. For example, on the St Ives to Penzance route, the 17E (GCB service) appears early on the route listing, but then towards the end of the list, one finds the 17/17A (First service). The displayed timetable in both cases includes only the 17E or the 17/17A respectively. If you click on the “pdf timetable” link, in the case of the 17E, you get the most up to date combined timetable from 1 September 2024. However, if you click on the link on the 17/17A timetable, you get the First only timetable for the service from 29 October 2023. Another example is separate timetables for the T1/T2/T3 First services and the T1E GCB evening services. Overall, the good work done in producing the combined comprehensive timetable book has been undone by the half-cocked way in which the timetable section of the new TfC website has been put together.

Tap and Cap: I have pointed out in previous postings about the inconsistency between the tap and cap guidance on the old TfC website and the GCB website (see three different websites). That inconsistency has now gone in that the new guidance now says, "What if I only make one or two trips? The system will record the bus stop you have boarded at, and the bus stop you alight at, and your fare will be charged at the rate of a single journey.” That is progress, I suppose.

Rail: the TfC website has made an attempt at integrating some information about rail travel on the site but on its page on Railcards, it surprisingly omits any mention of the Devon and Cornwall railcard.

Links: some of the links simply do not work. For example, on the page Partnership Enquiries, it says, "If you have a comment, suggestion or complaint about a specific route or service, contact the operator directly, as we don’t run any buses or trains directly.” If you click on the hyperlink text of contact the operator directly, you get the error message 404. There are other links where this happens, too numerous to list here.

Contact us: it is possible to find the contact us page via a different route, see contact us. It gives email addresses for the three main bus companies:
ask@gocornwallbus.co.uk - I have found that one generally produces a response in a reasonable time from GCB.
southwestenquiries@stagecoachbus.com - I have never tried contacting Stagecoach so I cannot say how effective they are at responding to queries.
emailus@cornwallbykernow.co.uk - when I have tried this email address in the past (see First contact not easy), I have received a reply saying that the email address does not work. Perhaps they have rectified it, but I would not count on it.

New Transport for Cornwall app: at the same time as the new TfC website launch, a TfC app has also been launched. Like the website, the new app is a rebrand of the Go Cornwall Bus app with the addition of First timetables and live information on First services. Stagecoach services are also absent from the app.

Overall, it looks like the ambition to "bring all your essential travel information together in one place with a website and app”
has proved too much for the Transport for Cornwall partnership and it has been left to simply renaming what was already there (the GCB website and app) and doing the minimum amount of work to enable it to be called a Transport for Cornwall product.