Boarding point

The place where you wait in order to board a bus. Even at bus stops sharing one name, the boarding points are frequently split up by direction and by route, and at terminals such as those in front of stations they are distinguished by numbers or letters.

What a boarding point is

A boarding point is the place where you wait in order to board a bus. Even when the stop carries a single name, the spot you ought to stand at is not necessarily just one. In a station plaza or at a terminal they are separated by number, as "boarding point 1", "boarding point 2" and so on, and each has its own set of routes and destinations. At stops out on the street too, the boarding points for the outward and return journeys are normally split across opposite sides of the road.

What a navigation app or a route map tells you, in most cases, goes only as far as the name of the stop; getting from there to the right boarding point is the part you confirm with your own eyes. Which is precisely why knowing the idea of a boarding point makes such a difference to how comfortable bus travel feels.

One stop name can cover several boarding points

"I got to the bus stop, but my bus never came": more often than not, the cause of this failure is standing at the wrong boarding point. Even at stops with the same name, the boarding points are divided by direction and by route, and the positions can lie tens of meters apart, in some cases separated by an intersection.

Know how this works and you are unlikely to get lost even somewhere new. On reaching the stop, start by checking the pole or the information board for the routes and destinations served by that boarding point. If the route you want is nowhere to be seen, reason that there must be another boarding point and look around for it. With those two steps in place, you will never again wait indefinitely for a bus that is not coming.

At large terminals, a table matching boarding point numbers to destinations is usually gathered on an information board, so hunting down the overall layout first is the quickest way in. Our article on how to find bus stops and boarding points gives the tricks for the search in detail.

How it differs from a stop and a pole

A stop is the word for the cluster of positions where buses halt, referred to by a name such as "Shibuya Sta.". The relationship is that one stop may contain several boarding points within it. The information pole standing at a boarding point, meanwhile, is called a hyochu, and it carries the stop name, the routes and the timetable. Finding the pole is the shortest route to finding the right boarding point. Get the relationship between the three words into your head and the wording of maps and announcements starts to come across without effort.