On Tue, 6 Apr 2004, Dave Arquati wrote:

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.

I think mixed services as proposed in Tom Anderson's post would be very
useful for inner London areas not served well by rail-based modes - for
example Hackney, Camberwell, Chelsea. Such services could serve all
stops until reaching a railhead, and then run fast from there

I think there's a flaw in this idea: these buses have to make up for the
lack of rail lines in those areas, and that means providing a fast inward
service; running all-stops to the railhead is utterly wrongheaded. Think
about it: the all-stops part would be no faster than catching a local, so
why not just catch a local to the railhead and a train from there? Rather,
the service has to run fast from the start to the railhead, along the
lines of the tram-busting services i vaguely alluded to in the recent
thread.

The more i think about it, the more i think my express plan isn't very
useful over this sort of scale. You either have to scale down the
Metropolitan scheme uniformly (which would mean running fast into local
centres - something like Northwold Road, Clapton, Linscott Road and then
fast to Hackney Central, which frankly seems quite silly, as it's only a
few minutes anyway), or maintain the scale and do something like
Walthamstow Central, the Leyton stops, the Lea Bridge Road stops and then
fast to Liverpool Street. The latter option might be useful, but i think
the uniform wannabe-tube plan (stopping only at Walthamstow Central,
Leyton, Clapton, Hackney, Shoreditch, Liverpool Street) would be better,
as it puts a useful service in reach of more people (where 'in reach of'
is basically not more than 10 minute's walk, which is about 500 m).
Perhaps the one case it would be useful is in a very Metroland-like
context, for example if you wanted to bring fast TfL connectivity to the
borough of Havering; you could have a bus that went express to various
points around Romford, and then busted it non-stop down to Liverpool
Street. Or something.

for example, a Camberwell service might run all stops to Elephant &
Castle, and then London Bridge, City (say Monument station), Liverpool
St.

Hey, that could be the other end of my local route - it would follow the
current route of the 48 from Walthamstow Central, all stops to Liverpool
Street via Leyton, Clapton, Hackney and Shoreditch. Or maybe it'd be fast
from Hackney (the first meaningful railway station).

tom

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