This week in Shanghaiist
Buses are everywhere and go everywhere in this city. But for those of us less familiar with the system, it can be tough to puzzle out which ones we can actually use. Well... did you know that Google Maps now shows exactly where the various bus lines running around the Shanghai area stop? Even though ditu.google.com is in Chinese, it's bound to be a great resource for anyone who lives more than a ten minute walk from a subway station. Hurrah!
Figuring out Shanghai's bus system just got marginally easier
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Yes, however paying attention to construction areas is a must. The subway line and road construction areas have moved plenty of bus stops. These stops aren't on Google, and if you don't know where they are, you're going to have trouble finding them. These temporary bus stops only have the number of the bus written on placards or taped onto existing bus stop locations. If you're on a time schedule, I highly suggest trying out the bus route before you take it the first time direct from Google's DiTu service.
Are you serious? There are much better map services with bus routes or transportation guidelines out there. The site I personally use is ddmap (http://www.ddmap.com/), which allows you to design routes, see what is the best combination of buses to arrive, time, places of interest...
Honestly, for anybody with a minimal Chinese knowledge there is no excuse not to use the bus... and it is much, much less confusing than it seems.
I see a bunch of bus stops – that feature's been there for some time now – but how do you see the routes, or all the stops for one particular line?
Sorry to insist with a different website, I do not try to spam anybody, but I will give some basic instructions to DDmap, maybe you'll find them useful. In the home page, there are several search bars. The ones I use most are the second one on the left and the one immediately on the right.
The left one has two places where to enter info: the green one for the origin point, the red one for the destination (place name, address, etc.). Then you use the RED button to search for the best bus route (there are more options, though, if you can move in Chinese a bit).
The second search area (to the right of the previous one) gives you complete lines. You just have to write a route name, or number, or just the name of a stop and it gives you either the complete list of stops or all the lines that pass through a certain point.
Hope that is useful, I'm not sure if there is a way to do this with Google Maps yet.
True, Google Maps isn't quite there yet- you can click a stop to see what routes stop there, but they don't have a route list yet. But it's still better for point-to-point searching- DDMap's suggested route for a trip I make (From the intersection of Zhenbei Road/Meichuan Rd to 46 Yingao Rd) left me with a long walk to the first bus stop when the Google Maps way was much closer (DDMap's 3 recommended routes required 10-15 minutes' walk to the first bus stop while Google Maps put me on the bus that stops that intersection with a change to the subway). They've got a bit of work to do there.