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).

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

When Jeffrey Archer was standing for Mayor, he had a plan to run a
series of orbital and radial express coach routes within London.

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.


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