Should We Londonise All Buses?
I know I’m a Londoner and live in the finest city in Europe, let alone the UK or England, but in my travels around the country, I have come to the conclusion, that most bus services outside the capital are very second-rate.
To start with, I should say that in most places it isn’t mainly the buses themselves, as towns and cities like Leeds, Manchester, Bristol and several others have buses that on a quick look to be on average to be the same condition and age, as those in London.
But there are three major differences.
- Most London buses are front entrance and centre exit, which effectively means that they pick up and set down passengers a lot quicker. It also means in London’s case, that a wheelchair passenger has an easier route to get on and off, as he or she uses the middle door. Because of the smaller dwell time at stops, two door buses actually travel faster and carry more people more efficiently. Whether this means the capital cost per passenger journey is lower, I don’t know. But it may well be so!
- London buses also announce the next stop both visually and audibly. Many visitors to my house are very surprised, when I say something like take the 141 to Balls Pond Road and get off there. The system also announces route changes and can be used by the driver to send a selection of common messages to the passengers.
- But the biggest difference is that all London buses are touch on, either with an Oyster card or a concession like my Freedom Pass. If you have a paper ticket, you show it to the driver and they tell you to get on. There is no timewasting mucking about with paper tickets, that London obviously deems to be just litter.
- From next summer, you will be able to touch in on your bus journey with any credit card, as Oyster is being augmented for the Olympics.
But it is the field of information that London buses are streets ahead of every other bus system in the UK.
- As a child, you were always told, that every tube station had a street map of the local area. So if you got lost, just go to the Underground station. So now, like many Londoners, when you are going somewhere foreign like Croydon for a North Londoner or Wembley for a South Londoner, you never carry a map and rely on the map at the destination station. It usually works. Now this street map system has been extended to the buses and most bus stops have a local street map. Only last night, whilst walking back from the pub, I used a map on a stop to show a tourist from Germany, how to walk to the pub where he was meeting a friend.
- These street maps are paired with spider maps, which show all the routes in the area, where they go and at which stop you catch the bus. Frank Pick and Harry Beck would be proud of this idea from their successors. Spider maps work well and if I’m lost after a walk, I just find the nearest bus and work out how to get home. Incidentally, Transport for London call them bus route diagrams, but you can’t argue with umpteen million Londoners, who call them spider maps and that term is now the one generally used by all.
- London has recently introduced text messaging at stops to find out how long you have to wait for the next bus. Other cities have this and it should be the norm everywhere.
- Important London bus stops have displays showing how long you’ll have to wait for the next bus. But as people are starting to use the text system more and more, I suspect, the number of these displays will decrease.
- You can also see when buses will arrive at a stop either through the web or from a phone app. I don’t have a smartphone, but my dumb Nokia 6310i is perfectly capable of telling me if a 30 bus, which is my preferred route home, is due ten minutes out of Kings Cross or Euston.
So how do some of the places I’ve visited compare to London in various areas?
Two Door Buses
You see the odd ones about, but not many.
On-Bus Information Systems
I’ve never seen one, but I’m told Colchester has them.
Maps at Bus Stops
Very few and most that I’ve seen have been very inferior and totally useless for visitors.
Text Information
This is a typical London next bus information notice.
London Sign For Bus Information By Text Message
And here’s one from Leeds.
Leeds Sign For Bus Information By Text Message
No prizes for guessing, which is the simpler system.
Not only is London, just a five digit number but the sign is easily read and is as low as they can put it, so that everybody from say eight to eighty can read it with ease. I can’t believe that there are over 45 million bus stops in Yorkshire! The london sign has the great advantage that it is small and just strapped to the post. So perhaps it could even be used on a temporary bus stop at road works.
I’ll let Frank Pick have the last word on this.
The test of the goodness of a thing is its fitness for use. If it fails on this first test, no amount of ornamentation or finish will make it any better; it will only make it more expensive, more foolish.
And he was born before the age of modern technology. He would have had a field day, if he was still alive and in charge of transport for the whole of the UK.
So to answer my original question, the answer must be an undoubted yes! London has proven that good, frequent and understandable bus services attract more riders, so the sooner we Londonise all buses the better.
People will go on about cost, but the first thing to do is get the maps at stops in place and get sensible text messaging systems working. And then we just have to make all new buses to the London standard! Remember too, that London retires quite a few buses each year. Many of these with a bit of refurbishment would be very suitable for lighter use in the provinces. Certainly, many of the older ones in London are much better, than the disabled-unfriendly old banger, I got back to the centre from Elland Road.
I think too, that we will underestimate the benefits of having the same bus information systems all over the country.
As an example, how much of my time and effort have I wasted trying to find out where to catch a bus on my challenge? And how much money have I wasted on unnecessary taxis?
So if it made travel easier and cheaper, would it make it easier for people to travel to work in the next town or perhaps have a day with Aunt Edna in Felixstowe?
We need any economic stimuli however small.
Remember too, that if we need new buses, that these are generally built in the UK, so much of the capital cost of new buses stays here. So if that is the case, why did Red Ken betray British workers, by buying a load of useless bendy buses? Few liked them, except perhaps fare dodgers.
The Anonymous Widower 
Really? I think London buses aren’t all that special.
Suggest you look at buses in Nottingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, Sheffield, Newcastle and some other cities and you’ll see.
Nothing on this article is particularly revolutionary to London, and after all…if you can’t read a bus timetable, then you’ve got problems.
Comment by Dave Thomas | October 25, 2011 |
I’ve used Edinburgh buses a lot and they aren’t very eas to use. Try finding a stop in the city centre for a start.
As for your last comment about being unable to read a bus timetable, I can, but many can’t, as they have visual problems. Somdo you want to trap people like that in their own homes.
Comment by AnonW | October 25, 2011 |
Great post: you’re absolutely correct about why London’s bus network is the best in the world.
But you’re wrong about bendybuses, which have been entirely suited to the job expected of them. Since Boris Johnson got rid of them due to ill-informed advice on what might win him the election (it worked, but his advisors know nothing about runningu transport) we’ve seen chaos outside places like Waterloo and Victoria, where there are either too many buses in replacement (38) or too few and too small (normal single deckers on the 521). Bendy buses on both those routes just vaccumed up queues and never left anyone behind.
I’d personally like to see the return of the bendy bus, and for politicians to leave decisions over what sort of buses should be on our streets to the professionals, rather than getting stuck in an expensive 1950s timewarp about ‘new Routemasters.
Comment by Paul Prentice | October 25, 2011 |
I take your point about the bendy buses at Victoria and Waterloo, but the real problems about the benys was the massive fare evasion. Where I am in Dalston, no-one seems to be missing them. They weren’t very good for people with balance problems either. I say that from my own experience. Luckily though my balance has got better.
Comment by AnonW | October 25, 2011 |
An interesting blog post, with some good points particularly on information. But one thing that seems to be overlooked is a key issue outside of London – reliability of services.
This is less of an issue in London, particularly Central London, where high frequencies gives passengers assurances that no matter when they arrive at the stop, a bus will arrive soon. But on infrequent routes in rural areas this is a major issue. If the bus is delayed, or doesn’t even turn up, it significantly detracts from the attractiveness of the limited public transport offer.
The message needs to be the same: get the basics of the service right first. By that i mean a reliable service on decent quality buses, going to where people actually need to travel to, with good quality basic information. Then everything else can be built on top of that.
On the information side, i’m a great fan of mobile information, but we need to accept that not everybody owns a mobile, and even fewer own a mobile with web access. So a variety of at-stop information is needed.
Comment by James Gleave (@jamesgleave1) | October 25, 2011 |
You do need a variety of informnation services, but the text is very useful. I know of one not-so-young person near me, who always texts the stop to find out how long she has to wait before she leaves home. Texting is much more common in the elderly than anybody things. After all, it’s known that the Queen does it. She’s no spring chicken.
Comment by AnonW | October 25, 2011 |
What annoy me the most about British Buses is the 1920’s style of ticketing. For every bus you need to buy a new ticket from the driver.
Take Almere (Greater Amsterdam) as an example about how you should run your bus system.
Throughout the City dedicated Bus routes, not lanes in a road, but a fast tramway like network will take you everywhere you want. Buses run every 10 minutes on the less used lines, and up to every 5 minutes on more important routes.
Every bus stop has displays showing the next 5 upcoming buses, and how long it takes before the bus will arrive. And when I step in, at the front – middle – or even at the back door of the bus I simply touch in with my smart-card…
At the station I check out, alight, and check in again (same card) for the train.
Comment by Otto | October 25, 2011 |
London buses are just touch in and have been for several years. In the provinces you always get a paper ticket, even if you are travelling on a free concession.
The only time you use a paper ticket in London is when you buy one deliberately or have added buses to a rail ticket.
By next summer, you’ll just be touching in with either your Oyster or Freedom Pass, or a credit or charge card. The latter system is going world-wide, so visitors to a strange city, won’t hasve to buy bus, tram and underground tickets.
Comment by AnonW | October 25, 2011 |
Very good article. London buses have a lot to teach the rest of the country. I was on a London bus last week and I like the next stop information, very useful. But I would find frequent audible messages annoying on my regular bus into York. The buses from York to Leeds had TV screens showing the next couple of stops, which was very handy, you could work out which would be closest to your destination, rather than jumping off at the first stop in Tadcaster.
The big difference between buses in London and the rest of the country is the numbers of people using them especially for short journeys. London buses need two sets of doors because there are significant numbers of people boarding and alighting at the same stop. In provincial cites there will be three or four city centre locations where this may happen, otherwise passengers are doing one or the other so one door is sufficient.
Comment by chris | October 25, 2011 |
You get used to the messages on London buses and I’ve never heard anybody complain.
I think there is also a chicken and egg syndrome with London buses, because they are fast, comfortable and often more convenient, more people use them. One idea that works in Cambridge is that some routes cross the city, so that they only pick-up and set-down and don’t have to have a terminus in the city centre. The park and rides are also paired and act as normasl routes as well. It would be equivalent of an express Bradford-York service, which went straight through the centre of Leeds picking up and setting down at seeral important places.
Talking of Leeds, I did like the thought that they had over 45,000,000 bus stops.
Comment by AnonW | October 25, 2011 |
Paying for tickets and getting on & off buses costs time and time means more buses needed to maintain the frequency of service.
2 or even more doors are the answer for intensive city centre routes with off-bus ticketing or even free trips as happens in many US cities AND in the UK – at Heathrow Airport. To see how real high volume buses operate view the Street Films for Curitiba and Bogota BRT systems – delivering 35,000-40,000 passengers per hour. Trams, at a fraction of the cost, delivered in a fraction of the time, and THE way to deliver the Cross-River and Uxbridge Road corridor routes, with articulated vehicles on dedicated pavements (with special licence if required to run on normal carriageways to & from depots etc). Talk here in terms of 4 double doors per side, 25 metres long 3 sections and 200+ passengers, plus average running speeds around 3 times faster than a typical bus service.
No one did the most obvious thing when the Citaros were challenged on safety grounds. All but the earliest buses have external CCTV binnacles on the side of the rear section, filming continuously. No-one has put any of this material through a digital image processing system to pick out the events where a cycle or pedestrian image comes within say a metre of the rear unit, or other selected conditions. The whole safety debate could have been settled with the facts of recorded events rather than heresay. Remember too that the first artics were running in London with high-floor Leyland and MAN chassis, and First operates a substantial fleet of artics built in Ballymena with Volvo and Scania chassis. One detail point though – the early artics were tractor & trailer, but the modern ones are ‘pushers’ and this causes the centre axle to drift outwards when powered into a corner, reportedly oversteering the rear end by around a foot at speed, and making the bus appear to really hug the curve. Could this create the impression it gets in too close?
Comment by Dave H | October 25, 2011 |
Very interesting blog, I think the GB bus system is slightly archaic in it’s approach, however I do think the the tables are slowly being turned. At the recent Traveline 11 conference a big emphasis was placed on mobile/web technology, with more people demanding information on their mobile this will be the key medium for giving information.
The SMS code service should be a 5 digit code for every bus stop in GB, however I’m guessing as the two text codes are different these could be different schemes. More information can be found about the mobile schemes offered by Traveline on the subsequent link http://traveline.info/mobile.html
Echoing the views of James, the key is providing a reliable service, if people know that the bus will turn up on time then the need for this extra technology would almost become redundant.
Comment by Basemap (@basemap) | October 25, 2011 |
Thanks. I use the new London technology all the time and I haven’t found a bus stop without it in the last few weeks. The great thing about the London system, is that it’s only a 5 digit code for the stop and they place them so everybody could see them. I don’t know if this happens elsewhere, but several times at a stop in London, one person has done the texting and then shared it with everybody else. I even saw a perhaps eighteen-year-old showing a lady at least four times his age, when her bus would arrive. I bet TfL didn’t expect that to happen.
Comment by AnonW | October 25, 2011 |