(This is not meant to have any relevance to London-Oxford travel;
I just thought some readers here might find it interesting. I'd
change the subject line, but I doubt there will be any followups...)

Martin Underwood:
Has Gloucester Green always been just for long-distance buses or did
all/most buses call there at one time. For some reason, the concept of
having one central place where you can guarantee all buses will stop seems
to have fallen out of favour in most towns these days.

Terry Harper:
It never has been for city buses, only those going out-of-town and
long-distance coaches.

Unless you live in Guelph, Ontario, Canada.

When I moved there in 1964, there were about 11 bus routes, all radiating
from St. George's Square (SGS) in the city centre. Almost all buses left
the square synchronously, every 20 minutes, although a couple of routes
were less frequent. On Sundays there were only 4 routes, different from
the regular ones, and they ran every 30 minutes from SGS. Oh, and by the
way, no route maps were available. The population of the city was then
about 45,000, soon increased to 60,000 or so by an annexation.

A few years later they revamped the bus system -- after which all buses
left SGS every *30* minutes, serving a total of *9* routes. I think
Sunday service was unchanged at first, then shut down altogether. And
that's what it was still like when I moved away in 1972.

Looking under http://guelph.ca now (the city now has 125,000
people), I find that the bus network *still* consists almost entirely of
routes radiating from SGS and running every 30 minutes, although they
do now run 7 days a week. There is just one route, a loop in the south
part of the city, that does not serve SGS, and I see that next week(!) a
second loop, a circuit more or less around the city limits, is being added.


Another curious feature of the Guelph transit system when I lived
there was that most buses actually served two routes alternately,
and the route signs were changed near the outer ends of the routes,
as if they were destination signs. So an northbound bus on the Elora
Road route was signed Elora Road, but a southbound was marked Waterloo
Avenue, because that's the route it would run onto upon leaving SGS.
This was makes some sort of sense for routes whose name relate to
the street they follow, but it was even done during a period when the
routes had only numbers and no names. This was undocumented -- if you
wanted to know what the bus route serving your area was called, you
either had to ask, or you had to see the bus while running away from SGS.
--
Mark Brader | "Don't be a luddy-duddy! Don't be a mooncalf!
Toronto | Don't be a jabbernowl! You're not those, are you?"
| --W.C. Fields, "The Bank Dick"

My text in this article is in the public domain.