please empty your brain below
Seriously. The MWLB's. You are slowly becoming one.
Would you repeat your time and motion study just before they suspend that bus stop, to see whether anything has changed? Could be interesting.
First use this stop as a temporary garage often turfing passengers off owing to no relief driver, and parking the bus/buses up out of service, although they obviously vehemently deny this. There is usually an out of service bus there.
Should be interesting next month when the stop is closed to build the bike lane
Expect several more posts about the minuses of Cycle Superhighways, as well as the plusses.
That doesn't take account of the need to adjust the seat, steering wheel, mirrors etc (the nearside one being particularly difficult as you obviously can't adjust it while in the seat, so can't tell exactly where you should adjust it to), hang coats/bags up etc - the unavoidable physical realities which take some time.
That said I do agree driver changeovers do usually take too long, and usually because of totally avoidable issues.
Drivers are required to take a minimum length of break. This may explain why a relief happens late and passengers end up waiting. If their incoming trip was delayed and they have to take 40 mins break then their pick up will be late. Given the huge volume of road works affecting the 25 is it any wonder buses are delayed and bunched?
TfL are trialling a modified sign on process where the drivers don't have to remove / insert modules at changeovers. The module will remain with the bus with only the first and last driver having to do a full sign on. Intermediate swap overs will be faster with much less faffing about.
A route like the 25, regardless of operator, will always have some bunching. It operates to a very high frequency making bunching almost unavoidable and the patronage level means you get streams of people at stops making it hard for drivers to actually close the doors!
I also agree with Mr Bowden and Scrumpy - there may well be instructions from the I-Bus room for buses to pause / wait time. Also Bow Church is effectively a sort of "on the road" bus garage with spare vehicles waiting. I take your point about the CSH works but there is no bus garage directly on the line of route that can run the 25 given its huge allocation. Regardless of who runs it there will be buses waiting somewhere and most likely in the middle rather than at the ends. IIRC Stagecoach had handovers at Bow when it was run with bendy buses from West Ham garage.
@ Geofftech - isn't it a tiny bit cheeky to taunt DG and MWLBs when you're the Uber Man who loves the Tube / Overground / Canals?
As one who caught the bus to and from secondary school for eight years, though not in London, this sounds all too familiar.
Neither of which are either as cheap, or call at as many places - notably Bow itself.
I remember back in the seventies on a radio interview the head honcho at London Buses said with a straight face (all right, it was radio, so I don't know what his face looked like) that buses were never left uncrewed with passengers on board at changeovers. Replace "never" by "invariably" I thought, from my experiences on the 37* on the Upper Richmond Road - the typical delay suggesting that the new crew didn't set off on the walk from the garage** (300m away on the other side of the railway) until they saw the incoming crew walk in.
*Then running Hounslow to Peckham
** Mortlake, now closed
Wow!
1 - under tendering, the operator's garage doesn't have to be even near the route. Not that 'LT' let this bother them: the 25 had been run from former West Ham (not the present one!) and Forest Gate (closed years ago) garages, both off-route, so there has to be travel time for staff to and from the buses. 'Minimum breaks' have already been noted above.
2 - each taking over driver is legally obliged to check the bus for 'faults' as well as take advice from any roadside staff and/or route controller (by radio). The rest is p***ing about unless there is service disruption to sort out.
3 - Bus driving is a difficult job and we all lose our cool sometimes. You try getting up 3am for an early shift and staying cool all day... Some people do not have realistic choices about what work they do. There's a current London-wide driver shortage - the hours and pay (and some passengers) have a lot to do with that.
4 - 'LT' operations had a near cast-titanium rule that crew changes were never to be in the direction of flow of the majority of passengers, so in the morning peak on this example the 25 crews would only change in the eastbound direction, and in the evenings westbound. This was before passenger numbers went stratospheric and today that would be difficult to manage.
5 - with the buses sold off, these 'inefficient' crew workings (can't get the maximum number of 'wheel-turning' hours out of each driver), were abandoned.
6 - our mate Ken, to make things easier for London bus passengers, ruled that all buses should be timetabled for the whole length of the route and only turned by controllers for traffic or crew shortage reasons. Many 'LT' routes used to operate in overlapping sections, such as the peculiar 'horseshoe' former route 253 - its sections are now the current 253 and 254. Buses on the former 253 rarely ran end-to-end (eg early am, late eve and some weekend journeys). This made good use of buses and crews and prevented unnecessary mileage where there was no justifiable demand (there's always a few who will be inconvenienced).
7 - Ken also made buses run the same route all day every traffic day, to eliminate service differences and assist people to navigate London.
8 - Combine these changes with privatisation, and you lose all of London's previous passenger-oriented (or not!) bus services, which used to include different garages working the same routes at weekends. Some of that was balancing out weekend work (which paid extra to staff for unsocial hours) at garages, but some was also the will of the T&G, who like management on occasion looked inward first and missed the point about who the buses were for.
9 - Nothing's perfect and running a bus service (well or not) is a miracle of logistics, buses, fuel and staff, and maybe a thought for the schedulers who actually do the work, and do try to serve passengers might not go amiss.
And no, I'm not a bus scheduler (although I almost was...) - the job did however have its own peculiar attractions for those of a logical frame of mind plus a practical imagination to solve the problems of creating viable schedules...
Be careful about judging too harshly. Yes sometimes it's just a natter between colleagues but not always.
@ timbo
37 Peckham to Hounslow; those were the good ol days. Use to be one of my favorite routes.
Changeover are the only social occasions for drivers and I would certainly drive as fast as possible from the previous timing point to give myself a few minutes to chat.
It's always been like this. I can remember how in the 50s the 623 and 625 trolleybuses hung around for ages at Hoe Street while drivers and conductors chatted and changed over. Particularly annoying as the fish and chips I'd been sent out for went cold.
I also used to enjoy the 37 bus ride from Hounslow to Peckham
Maybe the 25 route should have kept the bendy bus.
1. There is a lack of communication – rarely is there a changeover announcement to inform passengers. Plus, when there are 5 buses waiting, nobody knows which one will leave first. It's frustrating when the bus at the back of the queue overtakes all the others and you're left being late.
3. The 25s sometimes drive really slow, presumably to prevent arriving early, which benefits absolutely nobody on the bus. I was on a 25 recently which was driving 18mph down the Bow Flyover (the bus was packed so I was standing at the front), even though there was nothing in front. Why not just drive normally and communicate the wait, if necessary, at the next stop?
At the end of the day I would rather TfL style bus services than some of what passes for bus services in other parts of the UK, let alone the rest of the world.
This is no criticism of Diamond Geezer who, as always, raises some good issues and backs it up with hard evidence,
I am happy to say that I was pleasantly surprised in London recently by the way that many if not most passengers said thank you to the driver on leaving the bus. The London thank you may be a perfunctionary remark compared to your experience in the 'provinces' but even the 'thank you driver' is increasingly rare in my part of Australia.
As an outsider, I think that Londoners tend to have an unfair reputation in this area. In my experience, most Londoners (of all races and social classes) seem to be quite polite.
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