"Tom Anderson" wrote in message
...
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.

Actually, I don't see any reason why you couldn't have the 'radial'
routes as well as the 'orbital' ones. Bus travel is cheaper and
much more frequent that rail services in some areas.

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 could be the main problem - although I'm gambling that most
bus journeys rarely ever take place over the full route. Perhaps
we can have an informal survey here - typically, how long is your
busy journey measured by bus stops? If I'm right, then we can have
an existing 9 mile route split into two 6 mile local routes with a
3 mile overlap, with the hope that very few people will have
their journey 'broken up'.

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.

It isn't, but if the stops are limited, I think it would be
reduced. I'm sure you know that bunching happens when the bus
ahead stops to hoover up waiting passengers, and thus the
bus behind (which has no passengers to pick up) can catch
up with the bus ahead. So the fewer stops there are, the
less chance of bunching (especially if at the major stops,
there are always people waiting to be picked up so that the
bus coming from behind doesn't have the chance to catch up).

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.

Agreed.

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.

I'm not really a fan of this - as I said in my reply to Dave
Arquati, I fear that it would confuse the passengers to have
to remember which part of the route is local and which is express
(and I *know* that confusion over bus routes is one thing that
drives many people away from using buses). I think it's simpler
for people to know that a route stops at several very prominent
stops, just like a railway route.