please empty your brain below

Having passed by on a 276 yesterday I was struck by the scale of development near the roundabout. As you say that's a key issue for future residents and it seems daft to make a key trunk route avoid a development.

Another key point is that the 25 is a 24 hour service and I wonder how people will feel losing access to a direct bus from the West End. Instead of 10 buses an hour to Stratford locals will have to walk to another stop or else rely on the half hourly 108 if going to Stratford or the N205 going round the back to Stratford City. Is there really a need to avoid the roundabout in the middle of the night?

One final point is if TfL are prepared to muck around with the busiest route in London like this, rather than provide proper bus priority, what does it say about their view of the bus network? Oh hang on - all the bus lanes have been scrapped to allow cycle lanes to be provided instead. The 276 I was on yesterday stopped at every stop from Stratford to Bow with people on and off at every stop. In the same time 1 cyclist used the adjacent CSH. Despite the cycle lane those living locally aren't minded to use two wheels even if they're just going to the shops up the road. Says something about the relative importance of a bit of blue tarmac compared to the red boxes on wheels running alongside.
A 1km gap between stops in reality means a half a km walk to the nearest stop, not a great distance by any stretch of the imagination, in my opinion there are numerous locations all over London where the stops on routes are far to close together and you end up with a service that can hardly get going without having to stop yet again. In many European cities such as for example Berlin a 1km gap between stops is about the normal distance and allows the service to run more reliably.
Why not have a bus stop on top off the flyover. They could install a ladder to get up to it.

.... and all this upheaval for ?
Reminds me of the headline - "The corporation is pulling out all the stops to make the buses run on time"

@Agent Z
You jest, but this is done on the 290 in Hanworth

Why is the 25 so long anyway? Given that its entire route runs parallel to railway routes, (and indeed right on top of them west of Bow), there must be very few people who would want to travel even half its length in one journey. If there is such a demand, maybe an X25 is in order, with two shorter routes covering short-haul traffic. Maybe Aldgate to Ilford (via flyover?) and Bow to Oxford Circus?

It used to be even longer - Victoria to Hornchurch!
http://www.londonbuses.co.uk/_routes/current/025.html

It's difficult to see the logic of curtailing the former City Thameslink short workings at Bank since the roadworks apparently the cause of this are all beyond City TL (and they need to go all the way to Mansion House to turn!)
@Agent Z
Until reunification, The West Berlin BVG also ran buses on Motorways on viaducts within the city. Now disused, some still survive. https://www.flickr.com/search/?user_id=53447297%40N00&sort=date-taken-desc&text=jakob-kaiser-platz
@Fishislandskin
Well said. All this obsessive whinging about having to possibly walk at most another 500m and maybe wait a few extra minutes. Pathetic. Next we will see mithering about having to cross the road to post a letter and how it will take an extra 32.31 seconds on average.
What really needs doing in London, and other cities, to get the traffic and buses flowing sensibly is to ban the majority of cars and vans. Also, possibly, lorries.

Under a Conservative mayor, under a Conservative government?
Walk 500m to a bus stop? Eee, you nanmby pamby southerners have it easy. Some places, you have to trek across three ploughed fields, a stream, and two barbed-wire fences, and stand in a windswept bothy the sheep use as a lavatory, and hope that you've remembered whether it is this every-other-Wednesday that the bus calls here or whether that was last week, and is there an R in the month?
And will the bus company go out of business before you want to go home again?
The gap's more of an issue on the Stratford side - the doomed stop on the Bow side is already very close to the previous (newly-combined) one. It's the Stratford side where there's quite a gap between there and the next one. Maybe rejigging the spacing of the stops up there would be better? But then, given they've not that long ago spent a fortune on bus stop bypasses I can't see that happening!
@BowDeservesAllItGets

Nice trolling. We'll just quietly ignore TfL's commitment to providing a universal bus service, the months of dishonesty implicit in this recent announcement, and the fact that buses tend to be the public transport of choice for a majority of disabled passengers for whom a 500m walk is no trivial matter, shall we? Eh, who am I kidding, if you were capable of empathising with people affected by things that do not personally affect you you wouldn't have written that bilge.
There's no way of knowing how far a bus user has already walked to get to the bus route.
And the walking route between remaining stops includes the crossing of the enormous Bow roundabout, if I am not mistaken.
An X25 (and X238) of sorts has been running for many weekends over the last few months, the rail replacement service from Tower Hill to Barking. It follows the 25 from Aldgate to Stratford. Very popular as it's a faster alternative to the 25 (assuming the driver doesn't get lost on this straight road section, which has happened) with no enforcement of fare payment.

Although a X25 would probably be well used with high load factors, it's not the best use of public money given there are actually parallel rail services, linked with cross platform interchanges, to cope with much of the demand. I can't see it happening.
For the people having a pop at those of us not happy with the loss of service at bus stops then it is worth bearing in mind that TfL's own policies aim to provide a bus service within 400m of where people live. Now OK that doesn't guarantee a bus to Central London, just a service. However the issue at Bow is that a lot of housing is being built just beside where the 25 will divert thus removing 15-20 bph from those stops. To reach the 25 people will probably have to walk across Bow Roundabout which is a "life in your hands" exercise at present. Also the other buses to Central London (8, 205) all start to the west of the roundabout so those new residents all face a trek past a horrible busy junction or paying two fares to get to the point where they change buses.

I understand all the arguments about "oh woe, what a hardship for your spoilt Londoners", "better to make the buses reliable" etc but this all feels a bit back to front. Rather than put the resources into the route to allow it to run properly this is about transferring "cost" to some passengers after TfL have had umpteen attempts to try to "fix" Bow Roundabout and not yet having succeeded.
Oh, indeed - the fewer stops the more reliable the service, but taking that to its logical conclusion means the bus should run end to end without stopping at all! This seems to be about making the service faster/more reliable for everyone else at the expense of the users of those two stops - but if they were in that much of a hurry to get to Stratford they could use the Central Line from Mile End or he DLR from Bow Church.

It may reduce the attractiveness of Strand East, but at least that is a new development so its future residents will not be deprived of something they once had

@PC "To reach the 25 people will probably have to walk across Bow Roundabout which is a "life in your hands" exercise at present."
But one of the reasons the 25 is being diverted is the effect on traffic of the forthcoming improvements to pedestrians crossing facilities there - so it will at least be easier to get to the next stop.
Here's the latest update from TfL:

"Bus stop M (Bow Flyover) will close later this year due to construction of the Cycle Superhighway 2 upgrade scheme.

The TfL website and letter did not include this information when the consultation launched on 2 September.

We apologise for this error."


What a highly convenient omission. Seems they've already made their mind up !
That information went up on 3 September.










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