Why can't I switch on taxi ranks?
Because there is no list of them to switch on.
Bus stops on this map come from NaPTAN, the Department for Transport's national register of public transport access points. It is the official one, it covers all of Great Britain, and it is free to use — it is where the 4,458 stops around Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire come from.
NaPTAN has stop-type codes for taxi ranks: TXR for a rank and
STR for a shared one. Filling them in is up to each council, and
neither Aberdeen City nor Aberdeenshire has. Checked on 7 August 2026, the
two areas between them register:
4,418 bus stops on street
23 bus and coach station bays
15 rail station entrances
1 bus and coach station entrance
1 airport entrance
0 taxi ranks
So there is nothing to filter and nothing to draw. The layer stays greyed out rather than showing an empty map, because an empty layer would read as there are no taxi ranks in Aberdeen, which is not true — it is only that nobody has written them down in the national register.
If either council registers their ranks, they appear here with no work at our end beyond a refresh. That is the advantage of using the official register rather than typing out a list ourselves: it stays right without us.
Why can't I switch on fuel prices?
The data is public and we are allowed to use it. The problem is where this site's server lives.
Pump prices come from Fuel Finder, the scheme that requires UK retailers to publish their prices. Its feed is restricted to requests coming from the UK, and our server is in the EU — hosting there costs appreciably less, which is what keeps this site free to use. The same code with the same credentials works from a UK desktop and is refused from the server, which is how we know it is the location and not the setup.
A support ticket is open asking for the server's address to be allowed through. Until it is answered the layer stays off rather than showing prices we cannot refresh.
Why do ships keep disappearing?
Two different reasons, and they look the same on screen.
The everyday one is how AIS works. A ship broadcasts its position on its own schedule, and one that is tied up alongside can go quiet for several minutes at a stretch. So the harbour fills in gradually rather than all at once, and a dot can be a few minutes old. Each ship's card says how long ago it last reported, so you can tell a current position from a stale one.
The other is that we get AIS from a free relay service, and free relays are not reliable. When theirs stops delivering, our ships stop appearing — there is no second source to fall back to and nothing we can fix at this end. It has happened for days at a time.
Aircraft have the same shape of problem, though it bites less often: they come from volunteer ground receivers, and an aircraft nobody's receiver can hear does not appear.
Paid feeds for both exist and are dependable. If this site ever earns enough from its affiliate links to cover its own hosting, that is the first thing the money goes on. It is not there yet, and we would rather say so than pretend the gaps are normal.
Why are bus times "scheduled" and not live?
Because for Aberdeen's city buses, nobody publishes live positions we can get at.
So the boards here are built from the published timetable. They answer what is due, and they never claim to know where a bus actually is. A bus running late will still show its booked time.
That is a deliberate line rather than a shortcut. A moving dot implies somebody is watching that vehicle, and for most buses here nobody is. A departure board makes no such promise, so a board is what you get.
The exception is Ember, whose electric coaches publish their own live feed. Those really are tracked, and they move.
My friend in England has live buses on their map. Why not here?
Because the law that made it happen stops at the border.
England's Bus Services Act 2017 obliges operators to publish their live vehicle positions openly, which is why the Bus Open Data Service has them and why English apps can show a bus creeping along a street. It is a duty, not a courtesy — the operators publish because they must.
Scotland's equivalent power is in the Transport (Scotland) Act 2019, and the part that would compel live data has not been brought fully into force. Transport Scotland consulted on the regulations through 2025 and proposed phasing them in between 2026 and 2028, with the smallest operators at the far end. Until that lands, publishing live positions in Scotland is voluntary.
Voluntary means most operators do not. Transport Scotland's own figures put roughly 40% of Scottish bus routes as having no open real-time data at all, and much of the rest goes to Traveline Scotland rather than to the national open feed. Asked the same question on the same day, that service returns:
London 7,612 buses Aberdeen 0 buses
Not an error, not a rate limit, not a misconfigured area — the same request that returns thousands of vehicles for London returns an empty list for Aberdeen. The boundary is complete in practice, not partial.
It is not that the data does not exist. First Aberdeen's buses are tracked, and there is a live feed of exactly what this map wants — behind a key the company has not issued to us. The tracking is happening; it is just private.
When the Scottish regulations commence, this stops being a problem and city buses appear here without anything clever needed at our end. Until then, no amount of work on this site can produce data that nobody publishes.
Trains move between stations. How, if there's no GPS?
They are estimated, and the map says so.
What we get from National Rail is arrival and departure times — including reported actuals as a train passes each station. Combined with the track alignment, that is enough to work out roughly where a service must be between two stations. It is arithmetic on timings, not a position report.
So a train's card tells you whether the estimate is anchored on a time the railway actually reported, and how old that anchor is. A train that has just left a station is placed well; one halfway through a long gap between reports is a considered guess.
Why isn't the whole trunk road coloured?
Because only the instrumented stretches are measured, and we only colour one when we are confident which road it is on.
Journey times come from loops cut into the carriageway. Traffic Scotland measure the stretches they have instrumented rather than the whole network, so the colour runs in lengths with gaps between them. A gap means no measurement there, not clear traffic.
Around Aberdeen there is a second reason, and it is worth knowing about. The A90 designation moved onto the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route when the bypass opened, and the old route through the city became the A92 and the A956. Some sections are still published under the naming the operator's own systems and road signs use, so the road a section names and the road it runs on are not always the same one.
Where those two disagree we place the section by its coordinates rather than its name — position is the more reliable of the two. Where that cannot be settled confidently, usually on a long route that crosses the city and touches several roads, we draw the marker and leave the road uncoloured. An uncoloured stretch is better than a confident line down the wrong street.
Closing those last gaps would mean the sections being published under their current road numbers, which is Traffic Scotland's to change rather than something we can work around here. Their own map is the reference for the operator's picture of the network.
Some layers are greyed out with no way to turn them on. Why list them?
Because their absence is information too, and hiding them would just move the question to "why is there nothing about flooding on here?"
Water supply, telecoms and flood warnings are all listed and all off. In each case no usable public feed exists for this area yet. Hovering a greyed layer tells you which of those it is — a missing feed, a key we have not been issued, or something that simply needs rebuilding at our end.
Why are there so many helicopters?
Because Aberdeen is the busiest civilian heliport in the world.
Almost all of it is crew changes for the offshore oil and gas fields. On a normal weekday the rotary traffic out of Dyce outnumbers the fixed-wing traffic, which is why the airport panel breaks helicopters out separately and why they are drawn with their own icon.
Is this official?
No. This is an independent site, not connected with the council, any operator, or any of the organisations whose data it shows. Nothing here implies their endorsement.
Every feed is credited on the Sources page, with its publisher and licence, so you can go and check any number against the original.
Can I rely on this?
Not for anything that matters. This is a map for curiosity and convenience — it is not safety information, it is not navigational, and it should not be used to decide whether it is safe to go somewhere or do something.
Everything here is somebody else's data, redrawn. When a feed goes quiet the map keeps showing its last good reading rather than blanking, so the Sources page is the way to tell "nothing is happening" from "we have stopped being told".
Something is wrong. How do I tell you?
There is a ⚠ button at the top of the map. It sends a report straight to the maintainer's issue tracker, and you do not need an account for it.
A problem report also attaches your browser version, window size and where the map was pointing, because "the map is blank" is not something anyone can go looking for and "blank at zoom 14 over Torry" is. Nothing else about you is stored, and nothing is shared with anyone.