Following on from what Helen was looking at yesterday, I’d spotted a quiet nugget on the express bus trial that had escaped attention before. First, let’s have the manifesto promise:
After talking to local people across outer London I believe there is untapped demand for a select number of new direct, frequent, and reliable services to link key locations in South London.
That is why I will commission a trial of orbital express bus routes for outer London. I believe they should be designed as a distinct mode of transport, connecting, for example, key rail terminals initially across South London with coach style vehicles and a limited number of stops. The fares should be no more expensive than current bus fares and should include full Oyster access
This was important, as South London has otherwise got the rough end of the pineapple under Boris, with many scrapped projects and a hamstrung Oyster implementation, so let’s see what the recent TfL Surface Panel report [PDF] had to say about how this went:
Route X26 is an express service between Croydon and Heathrow, stopping only in the main centres, including Kingston and Sutton. Frequency was doubled to half-hourly on 22 November 2008. Affected boroughs, Assembly Members and others were consulted in the usual way prior to the change. Passenger surveys took place, before and after implementation, to understand what trips people are making, how often, for what purpose, and their views on the change.
So far so good, although it’s hardly coach style on the X26.
The cost of operation increased by £1.2 million per year to a total of £2.4 million per year. Passenger usage has risen by approximately 80 per cent, or by 1,400 passengers per weekday, to a total of 3,200. Taking account of the extra fares income net of transfers from other services, the change has increased net operating cost by approximately £1 million per year. The benefits to passengers due to reduced waiting and travel time are estimated at approximately £0.9 million per year. Hence the change has a benefit to net cost ratio of 0.9 to 1. A ratio of 2.0 to 1 is normally required to justify ongoing subsidy.
Not so good. Boris, if you remember, is attempting to reduce the bus subsidy from £574m to £452m, so this, added to the uncertain multi-million pounds wasted on the New Bus project and debendification, is a distinct step in the wrong direction, and not the only one, either – we’ve yet to see what effect on bus finances the £140m cycle hire scheme (partially abstractive of passengers from buses, of course) will have, money that would have covered the gap quite nicely. Indeed, it’s possible to make a fair case that the cycle hire scheme is at least partially responsible for the cutbacks on the bus network.
On the bright side, people did like the extra services, but let’s see what conclusion TfL drew from the exercise:
The change has been well received by users and stakeholders. However, net operating costs have risen by £1 million per year, with benefits to a relatively small number of passengers. The frequency has been retained as withdrawal will lead to significant adverse reaction from stakeholders.
Translation: it’s expensive, doesn’t deliver the level of benefits normally expected of this level of investment, but we can’t row back for fear of unpopularity.
Wider research for the developing transport strategy indicates that the dominant type of bus trip in the suburbs will remain relatively local, either as a stand-alone journey or as part of a longer journey involving interchange in a town centre to another bus or a train.
Here’s the nub – Boris has implemented this policy based on a few chats with suburban voters. If he’d talked to some experts or done any background reading or had any feeling for how public transport actually operates, he’d have realised that what he was proposing wasn’t what people actually *used* in the areas concerned. Worse, by spending £1m a year for the foreseeable future propping up his failed experiment to avoid bad publicity while simultaneously making massive cuts elsewhere, he’s needlessly damaging the services people actually use in these areas. It’s hard to see how this could have been worse handled, really – a direct refutation of Boris’s manifesto that hits the very people it was intended to buy the votes of. As the report’s penultimate paragraph makes clear, this is the end of the road for this particular promise:
In the context of TfL’s current Business Plan, the level of benefit delivered per pound of investment suggests that further investment in express orbital routes would not be a priority over other calls on funding. Investment in new services for growth areas such as Barking Riverside and maintenance of adequate services in and around town centres more generally, were examples of these other priority areas.
Game, set and match.
Tags: 8 Comments
8 responses so far ↓
You could call the old RM route 37, that I used to get to secondary school, an “orbital” route. It ran from Hounslow Bus Garage to Peckham via Isleworth, Richmond, Putney, Clapham Junction, Brixton and Herne Hill. It was horrendously unreliable – quite often the first bus to turn up after school in Isleworth, Hounslow-bound, was so full that we couldn’t get on it and waits of between half an hour and an hour were not uncommon, only for two or three to then turn up at once.
The huge, lumbering RMs often couldn’t get around the side streets in Isleworth due to badly-parked cars and it wasn’t unknown for the driver and conductor to have to manually bump parked cars out of the way. The route was split into two overlapping sections in 1981: Hounslow to Clapham Junction and Peckham to Putney or Richmond. It now exists as *three* separate routes, the 37 from Peckham to Putney Heath, the 337 from Clapham Junction to Richmond and the H37 from Richmond to Hounslow Blenheim Centre.
Radial bus routes in London (into central London, into other town centres or to other key points) work quite well. There is quite a high demand, this justifies a frequent service, this justifies bus priority measures, this creates a perception of a resonable service (frequency, speed ,reliability) this in turn maintains a high demand. Even when there is some disruption, and buses are running late and being turned short of destination, there is usually something going your way within a few minutes.
With orbital routes in the suburbs you don’t get this positive feedback cycle. The 726/X26 has never justified a frequency of better than every 30 minutes. It runs through a series of town centres and other places with congestion problems, and congestion can be worse in the outer suburbs. These are areas where bus priority measures aren’t taken for granted, so the congestion hot-spots haven’t been sorted out. The tendency is for there to often be delays of 10 – 15 minutes. If a journey is turned short, it means a gap of one hour somewhere. The service is thus perceived as poor. Alternatively the recovery times at the terminals have to be very generous, adding to the costs. You tend to get a cycle of decline.
It isn’t impossble to develop some orbital links with a growth dynamic. Tramlink created a big market between Croydon and Wimbledon. It may be possible to do something similar without going all the way to tram or light rail: a high-frequency bus service with a high level of priority, between a pair of town centres (or other points of high demand) could create a growth dynamic. It would require, however, serious 24/7 priority measures; this may not go down well in the suburbs.
Better orbital bus links isn’t a daft objective, but I don’t think that there has been serious thought about where it should be done and what it implies. In the short term it isn’t do-able on the X26, but perhaps opportunities are being missed on routes like the 337.
My local bus routes are both orbital, and have gone from 15 min frequency to near-turn up and go in the last few years. They load quite well until quite late in the evening, too. They’re not express routes, though, they act as feeders into tubes and radial buses, which is one reason I’d like to see transfer tickets on buses so a two-bus journey doesn’t cost me £2.40, which is silly compared with the tube or train.
I agree that some orbital routes have improved and have reached the point where they are seen as “turn up and go”, so are fairly sustainable. (A bus route either has to be “turn up and go” or have a reliable and memorable timetable to be attractive, I would think). However there are still a lot of exceptions. I often use the 337 on Sundays, when the frequency is nominally every 15 minutes, but in practice half the buses get turned early because of the congestion in Putney or Wandsworth: half an hour sheltering in a shop door in Richmond is not going to attract passengers. This kind of issue gets more serious the further you go out from London and the longer the route. There are things that could be done, but they don;t seem to be in Boris’ strategy
Is there ever a good end of a pineapple?
The problem about the X26 is that it gets shafted by traffic at Worcester Park High Street. Along with Kingston town centre, this makes it too unreliable a service to depend on. If you want people to shift from car to public transport in the suburbs, you have to make it cheap and reliable. As Guano pointed out, Tramlink created a demand for an orbital route.
The same could be done for any well planned orbital route, whether by bus or another form of public transport. However as we have seen with the West London Tram scheme, the car lobby is powerful in Outer London, and is a demographic that the mayor does not want to upset with bus priority measures. It is easier in terms of votes to wave a subsidy around without it realising its full potential as is being done on the X26.
“Translation: it’s expensive, doesn’t deliver the level of benefits normally expected of this level of investment, but we can’t row back for fear of unpopularity.”
…..just about sums up every Boris mmanifesto pledge doesn’t it?
The fundamental problem with all orbital bus routes in saaaaf London is the Saaaf circular.
In the Norf I hear you have sections where it’s a dual (and tri) carriageway for your hackney carriages – however in the saaaf we have to go through every poxy little messy high street in saaaf London.
The only solution is a hub system where we have local hubs in the saaaf at mainline and tube stations (although there are only about 2 tube stations!) and have buses radiating from there to the suburbs.
You cannot build a house on sand and you cannot build a bus network on badly designed roads.
Tramlink is the way forward – I’m sure our previous mayor was talking about a norf / saaaf tram link…..I wonder what ever happened to that good idea?