Everyone Can Use The ULink Buses (U1, U2, U3, U4)

In September 2007 UWE launched its ULink bus services. Initially there were three routes U1 and U2 going from the Frenchay campus down the Gloucester Rd to the city centre, with the U1 continuing to the Bower Ashton Campus on weekdays, and the U3 which goes from the Frenchay campus to the city centre via the Glenside campus and Fishponds.

Uptake of the services was good and the number of daily runs on these services were soon expanded and a new route the U4 was added which goes from the UWE Frenchay campus and the city centre via the M32.

Initially these services were only for university students and staff. However in February 2008 the services were opened to the general public. The service is actually operated by Wessex Connect and uses brand new buses.

At £3 for an adult day ticket the service is very competitive. And if you plan ahead you can buy a monthly pass which lowers the travel costs even further. Obviously there is a student discount too.

Ticket Prices

Adult dayrider (available on bus) £3
Child dayrider (available on bus) £2
UWE dayrider (UWE ID card must be shown) £2
Adult monthly pass £39
Child monthly pass £25
UWE monthly pass £25

Monthly passes for the public are available from the following outlets:

Limelight News, 31 Penn St BS1 3AU

McColls, 2nd Floor The Galleries BS1 3XD

Crawford Newsagents, 200 Gloucester Road BS7 8NU

K and S News, 124 Stapleton Rd BS5 0PS

Tell the World

Web sites are made to be seen. But attracting visitors to sites is always tricky especially when your site is as unique as BristolStreets.co.uk because people don't search for things that they don't know exist.

A site like BristolStreets.co.uk is really a word of mouth site, where people who like it tell their friends and colleagues and they tell theirs and so on.

If you think this is a great site please tell everyone you know about the site.

Ways you can help:

1. Just Tell People: Just tell people and write the name of the site down for them (or email it to them, in fact why not email this site to anyone in your address book, right now, who you think might be interested).
2. Become a Facebook Fan: If you are on Facebook, you can "Become a Fan" of our Facebook page (use the link in the top right corner of that page). Then anyone looking at your profile will see the link to our page. You can also use the "Share with Friends" link on our page.
3. Social Bookmarking Links: At the bottom of the BristolStreets.co.uk main page there are links for social bookmarking sites Delicious, Facebook, Digg, Reddit and StumbledUpon. If you use any of these, it helps us if your click these and add us to your list of sites. This helps other people find us.
4. Tell Your Office Travel Manager: If you work in an office with lots of other people do you have a travel manager? If so please ask them to look at the site and contact us so we can help them get employees using the site.
5. Put Our Flyer in Your Office Reception: Maybe you don't have a travel manager but lots of people in your office commute? If so you can contact us and we can send you some of our flyers which you can leave in reception. Please use the contact form and give us your name, your company name, and its address and how many flyers you would like.
6. Post on Forumns or Mailing lists: Do you read any forums or email newsgroups where you can contribute? Could you post a message with a link to this site on that forum? If it has no relevance to the topic of the forum you should include "off topic" in the title.

We really appreciate anything you can do to help spread the word and get more people benefiting from using BristolStreets.co.uk

Improved Support Site

The focus of BristolStreets.co.uk is and always will be the map itself, but the pages you are looking at now are an important way for us to communicate to you the visitor. We have updated the site to make these pages easier to use and so that they support the main site better.

We have moved the contact form from the map page and into this area of the site. This is simply to make it easier to use and because there was a problem for visitors using Firefox as their browser. Firefox is a great browser and we want to support it in any way we can but there was a fundamental problem with text fields shown within the sidebar control on the map. (In Firefox the insertion point does not show when entering numbers on the property filter but hopefully this will be fixed in time.)

Thanks to feedback from users we have altered when stop markers are shown on a bus route. When you click on a route number to show the route on the map, it shows the whole route by zooming out. If it is a long route, it ended up looking like a big green caterpillar and all of the stop markers overlapped and covered up the surrounding map. To try and make the route and its context easier to see, the stop markers are not shown until you zoom in closer and they will be more spread out.

Another request we have been getting from lots of people is to allow the scroll wheel on the mouse to zoom in and out on the map. There had been a technical problem with this in that trying to scroll the schedules in the sidebar with the scroll wheel would also zoom the map at the same time. But after working on this for a little while a solution has been found. One note is that because the "terrain" style map that is the default on BristolStreets.co.uk does not have high zoom levels, you have to switch to "normal" or "satellite" to zoom in to a high degree.

We have also changed the items in the footer of the map page. This ties in with the changes we have made in these support pages. But we have also provided quick link buttons to help you share the site with your friends using Delicious, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and StumbledUpon.

City Cars, Mobile Phones and Browser History

Anyone who visits the site regularly will have noticed the addition of a few new features over the last couple of weeks. Here is an explanation of what has been added.

City Car Club - A great new addition to the information on the site are markers for the City Car Club cars in and around Bristol and Bath. City Cars are a fantiastic idea for anyone who needs a car in town from time to time but would rather not have the expense of owning a car all the time. The savings can be considerable. Once you are a member of the club you can book and use cars in any of the cities where the club operates which includes London, Edinburgh, Brighton, Norwich, Portsmouth, Camberley in addition to Bath and Bristol. In fact is you move the map to these other cities you will find the car markers will be shown for those cities too.

Mobile phones - Ever since the site first started one of the first questions people asked was "can I access this from my mobile?" The answer used to be no, but now it is YES! The mobile interface is entirely text based but this is good for small mobile screens and saves time and bandwidth which can be pretty pricey on mobiles. You can access the mobile interface at m.bristolstreets.co.uk and you can see instructions on how to use it through the mobile phone icon on the sidebar in the normal site.

Browser Back Button - Because Bristolstreets.co.uk uses a map and does not load new pages every time you click an link or function, the only way to go back to a previous marker was to use the "recent" list in the sidebar. Now we have added history logging so that each time you click on a marker or change the viewing mode (buses, cycles, ferries, etc) an item is added to the browser history so you can use the browser's back button like you can on old fashioned sites. It also means when you bookmark the site with a marker window open or with a mode selected, these features are also held in the bookmark and are restored when you use that bookmark.

There are so many things we want to add next we don't know which ones to do first. Keep checking the site as there is lots of great stuff to come.