Sky Fly wrote:

"Dave Arquati" wrote in message
...

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.

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

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.

Any comments?

It's a decent idea, and already runs on the Uxbridge Road as the 207/607
between Uxbridge and Shepherd's Bush - although to be replaced with the
West London Tram. I'm not sure whether they're going to retain the 607
(the express bus).


Do you know how effective/popular the 607 is? Knowing how an
existing express route works in practice will give a better
insight as to why this idea should/shouldn't be adopted.


There's also the 726 express bus in South London and the X68 from
Russell Square out to Croydon.


The X68 isn't quite what I had in mind - it's express from Russell
Square to West Norwood, whereas I'd be thinking of Russell Square -
Aldwych - Elephant - Camberwell - Herne Hill - Tulse Hill
- West Norwood - Whitehorse Road - Croydon. As to the 726, I
think that is *way* too long and too infrequent to be of
much use. If it ran from Heathrow to Croydon or Bromley to Sutton,
that might be better.


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


Or they could just take a local route to the Elephant and use an
express route from there. I think the idea of having a clear
hierarchy of transport routes is important, because people could
easily get confused and not know whether a bus is going to stop
at a stop or not.

If they were going to take a local route to the Elephant and change to
an express route, they might as well just change to the Underground. TfL
already have plans using Oyster Prepay for cheaper bus/tube transfers.

Having routes which run local in inner London and then express in
central London delivers price, time and convenience benefits to the
passenger in that they don't have to change.

I think confusion could be overcome by having clear branding.

--
Dave Arquati
Imperial College, SW7
www.alwaystouchout.com - Transport projects in London