On Tue, 6 Apr 2004 11:31:50 +0100, "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?

I have long been a fan of such an idea. This is borne out of experience
of express routes running in the old Met county areas like Tyne and Wear
and West Yorkshire where a multi centred conurbation can support such
services. The other key example which works well is Hong Kong which has
a hierarchical bus service network.

The really big issues for a London express network are (IMO)

a) ensuring sufficiently quick journeys to make the services attractive
in their own right.
b) ensuring they can operate reliably.
c) how to deal with the very strong competition provided by the rail and
tube network. One of the main reasons why such routes don't exist is
that they fail the "value for money" test when you look at the density
and capacity of the rail network in Greater London. I appreciate that
peak capacity is a big problem on much of the rail network but just
running express buses at that time just pushes up the peak time costs of
the transport network as a whole.
d) how you structure the network to balance journey objectives (which
are densely clustered in London) against quick journey time. There is no
point in providing express buses that don't take people where they want
to go but which are also slow!

In Hong Kong there are quite long distances between parts of the
territory and a good but limited rail network. There is a distinct price
difference between modes. The bus network is subject to government
control via a franchising process and limits on the total number of
buses in the company fleets. Hong Kong therefore has feeder buses to the
rail network, local routes serving all stops, a layer of express routes
which will link say Hong Kong Island and the New Territories plus
supplemental peak journeys that link big housing developments with key
employment centres. This structure tends to work very well but there is
a huge public transport market which can sustain high demand all day
every day - the lack of access to cars being the big difference to
London.

I would certainly like to see some additional radial express routes but
I think the key gap that does need to be tackled is orbital travel.
There are only a few routes that try to do such journeys and they are
not very quick - just look at the level of private transport on the same
routes e.g. A406.
--
Paul C


Admits to working for London Underground!