What Arr and the slash mean on a Singapore bus board

Every Singapore bus arrival display - the panel at the stop, the app on your phone - is reading the same feed from the Land Transport Authority. That feed answers with one of three things per bus, and mixing them up is the reason a board sometimes looks broken when it is working perfectly.

A number means minutes

The ordinary case. The bus is twelve minutes from this stop, based on where it is right now and how long that stretch of road normally takes.

It is a prediction, not a schedule. It will move as the bus moves, and it can move backwards - more on that in why arrival times jump around.

Arr means it is here

The bus is at the stop or seconds away from it. There is no number because there is nothing left to count down.

If you are reading this on your phone while walking, Arr is the point at which walking faster stops helping.

A slash means nothing was reported

This is the one people misread as a bug. A slash means the feed returned no arrival for that slot. In practice it is almost always one of:

• The service has finished for the night. Most Singapore bus services stop somewhere between 11pm and just past midnight.
• It is not running at this hour. Express and peak-only services show slashes for most of the day.
• Nothing is in position yet. The next bus has not started its run, so there is no vehicle to predict from.

A stop showing three slashes for one service and live times for every other service is not a broken stop. It is one service that has gone home.

The seat colours

Each arrival also carries how full the bus is when it left the last stop.

Seats means you will get one. Standing means room to stand. Packed means limited standing, and on a busy corridor it is a fair warning that you may not get on at all and should look at what is behind it.

Like the times, this is measured upstream and can be out of date by the time the bus reaches you - a bus that emptied at an interchange two stops ago will still be reporting what it was carrying when it left.

Why Whenbus draws them differently

Arr and / are set in a different typeface and a smaller size than the numbers, which is a deliberate choice rather than a stylistic one. They are words, not quantities. Set at the same size and in the same monospaced cut as a countdown, three capital letters shout louder than the two-digit number beside them, and the eye lands on the wrong card.