How the journey planner works
The planner runs on MOTIS over the same national timetable as the map, with walking, bike-to-stop options and search by street address.
The same timetable as the map
The OVatlas journey planner runs on MOTIS, an open routing engine, and works from exactly the same national timetable as the map. That sounds obvious and is not: on many sites the map and the planner are two separate products with two datasets, so a planned interchange can involve a trip you will never find on the map. Here it is one network. The line in your itinerary is the line that moves across the map as a marker, with the same stops and the same direction.
A planner does a different job from a map. It searches the timetable for combinations of trips that get you from A to B, weighs departure time, journey time, number of interchanges and connection time against one another, and counts the walk between platforms and stops as part of the journey. The result is a handful of alternatives rather than one answer, so you can pick between fastest, fewest changes, or simply the next thing leaving.
From address to stop
You do not need to know a stop name. Type a street address, house number and all, into the origin or destination field; the same search that finds stops and stations also finds addresses. From that point the planner works out the leg to the first stop and the leg from the last stop to the front door, so the journey time you see is the whole door-to-door trip rather than the stop-to-stop middle of it.
For those first and last legs you can choose how you travel. Walking is the default. Switch on cycling to the stop and the reach of your starting point grows considerably, which sometimes produces a completely different journey: a sprinter two stations away can be quicker to reach by bike than the bus stop around the corner, and an interchange disappears along with it.
What the planner does not do
Two things the planner deliberately leaves alone. It does not calculate fares: no price, no off-peak discount, no advice about season tickets. What a journey costs depends on operator, product, balance and subscription, and none of that lives in a timetable — for a reliable answer you need the operator itself.
And it does not route around live disruptions. The planner works from the timetable; the live reports about incidents and engineering works sit apart from it, in the disruptions panel. If something on your route is not running, the planner may still send you that way. So for a journey that matters, glance at the disruptions first, then use the map to check whether the vehicles on your route are actually moving. Those two checks take seconds and catch exactly the cases a timetable cannot know about.
Planner and map together
The combination is where this gets useful. Plan the journey, then watch on the map whether the bus you are waiting for is genuinely under way and how far ahead of or behind it is running. Because both describe the same network, there is nothing to translate between the two views: the line number in your itinerary is the line number on the marker.
An itinerary can be passed on: the link in your address bar carries your origin and destination, so whoever opens it runs the same search again. Bear in mind that this shares a search rather than a frozen journey — half an hour later the planner may well return something else. To let someone genuinely follow you, use the journey view of a specific vehicle instead: track a trip to your stop and share that, and the recipient watches the arrival time count down live, with no account and nothing to install.