On Tue, 6 Apr 2004, Sky Fly wrote:

Here's an idea I thought about to improve bus services in London.
Instead of having all bus routes serve all bus stops in London, there
would be a division of bus routes into 'local' and 'express' bus routes.

Bloody good idea. However, i think it would need to be planned in concert
with the rail network; you wouldn't want to have express bus lines
duplicating the inherently fast rail lines. Perhaps the bus lines would
assume a more orbital configuration, moving people around within the
suburbs rather than in and out of the town centre (exactly like the
Brixton - Croydon route you describe). Although it would be very nice
indeed if there were express night bus services covering the rail
corridors.

Local routes would serve all currently designated bus stops, but their
range would be limited so that no journey was longer than 5 miles.

So the existing routes would be split into 5-mile chunks? I'm not sure of
the necessity of this, and the introduction of arbitrary breaks would make
certain short journeys (from one side of the break to the other) much
harder than at present.

This would be to improve reliability - the longer a bus route, the
greater the chance that 'bunching' will happen and the more the
timetable is thrown out of whack.

I'm not entirely convinced that bunching is unavoidable with long routes;
surely it could be beaten by better control systems? I'm thinking of
detecting that buses are close (which would mean tracking them by GPS or
GPRS triangulation) and instructing the back one to slow down a bit.

Express routes would serve specially designated stops (which would be at
major town centres - as an example, the 109 which currently runs from
Brixton to Croydon might stop at Brixton, Streatham, Norbury, Thornton
Heath and Croydon). The routes would be longer distance routes, because
the limited stops would mean that the journey would be a lot faster.

Also, these routes would have priority for bus lanes, traffic modulation
measures, better driver training, linking of traffic lights to the bus
control system, bendybuses, nicer bus shelters, etc. Also, because they
only need to get from point to point without stopping on the way, they can
make more use of fast, non-stoppable roads like clearways and such, which
should speed them up even further.

A twist on the scheme would be to have partial express services, along the
lines of the fast Metropolitan services; you might have something which
looked like Finsbury Park - Hackney - Stratford which stopped at all the
present 106 or 253/4 stops between FP and Hackney, but was then express
from Hackney to Stratford. I have no idea if that particular route would
be any use, but there might well be cases where that sort of thing would
be good.

Anyway, it'd be one in the eye for the fecking tram nazis!!!

tom

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