please empty your brain below
Is it just me, or does this feel like the planned pedestrianisation of Oxford St has just been thrown out of the window?
Electric buses only in Oxford Street.
The 73 route keeps getting shorter.
The Stoke Newington end seems to stay the same, but it started life Stoke Newington to Richmond, has even ventured to Kingston and Hampton Court, and for a few years Stoke Newington to Hounslow. In recent years it was reduced to Hammersmith, then Victoria and soon will end at Oxford Circus.
As it is now a Boris Bus I will not be using it anyway! - maybe the unpleasantness of riding in a Boris Bus is the real why passenger numbers are going down in Central London.
dg writes: Noted, thanks. TfL's review has an October baseline.
The 8's run through Mayfair wasn't that time honoured, it was introduced in 1992 to replace the 25 (although this also served the City), and withdrawn in 2009.
If anything the opening of the Victoria Line did most of the damage back in '68/'69 - the extra buses that used to operate on the 25 Mon-Fri between Victoria and Aldgate were withdrawn, the 127 was cut back to Tottenham Court Road, then in 1970 the 134 was cut back to Warren Street and the 127 was withdrawn.
It appears from the map that the Strand is to lose the 13 as well as the 23.
dg writes: Separate consultation, already closed.
dg writes: No, they do listen, sometimes.
• Aldgate to Mile End: 2 more buses an hour
• Mile End to Stratford: 5 fewer buses an hour
• Stratford to Ilford: no change
Ha Ha, this is what it's really about, less to do with pollution on Oxford Street and more to do with cutting services to save money for Khan's fares freeze.
Probably far safer as well, considering the high number of accidents involving buses that the ES has reported in recent weeks.
What's not to like?
Oxford Street could not support a standalone tram network as there is nowhere nearby to put a depot - unlike buses, they can't run off route to get to an out of town maintenance facility. It might have been a good add-on to the Cross-River route (Peckham to Kings Cross, which would have passed Holborn station) but that project was scrapped by the new mayor in 2008.
Could the roof over the ticket hall at Oxford Circus support tram tracks, hate to think of the cost of moving all the other utilities, it would be an expensive duplication of part of the Central Line.
You could have elevated pedestrian walkways at first floor level, more expensive would be to move the vehicle traffic to first floor level with a fully enclosed pedestrian area below, there is enough space at Marble Arch for the ramps, at the other end the ramps could be near Holborn, the depth of the foundations would probably be an issue though.
Easy, peasy... just carry on along Theobalds Road, turn right into Southampton Row and there's a ready made underground depot. The tram tracks are already in place !
dg writes: No bus stop at the western end of Oxford Street is served by more than seven routes, let alone 20.
*Still Anon - indeed, and the recentish and ever growing 452 has drained trade from some of the 137's previously busy Clapham-to-Sloane Square section.
The collapse of patronage on so many services is confirmation of the disastrous legacy of 8 years of wrong headed transport policy in the capital and the ongoing paucity of ideas to make buses work more effectively under the new Mayor's regime. TfL are largely accountable for the mess but you'd never know it from the document. It's as if some extra terrestrial third party landed in London and caused havoc on the road network for 2-3 years and no one could do anything about it.
This is just the first stage of slowly unpicking and dismantling core parts of the bus network in Central London. This is a classic "step by step" approach that will see at least another 2 rounds of routes being thinning out, removed and frequency reductions. A fair number of routes are not in scope of these changes but they will be in scope in the next phases. £7m is a fairly small saving but I reckon that will be multiplied about three fold by the time TfL have finished recasting everything. There will also be a fair old number of NB4Ls looking for new homes too.
dg writes: The Bus Review document kicks off with a disturbing map showing that between 2015 and 2016 bus usage dropped in inner London (by 9% in Camden, Southwark and Tower Hamlets) but rose in outer London (by 3% in Croydon and Barking and Dagenham).
Stop R at the northern end of Park Lane has ten routes and I assume is the one David means - certainly his description fits
DG - I think David was referring to the southbound stop in Park Lane, although not served by 20 routes, stop R is served by the 2, 10, 16, 36, 73, 74, 82, 137, 148, 414, 436 and N16, N73, N74 and N137 - the pavement is narrow and it is chaos. [Google maps]
PC - its not TfL gridlocking London with cycle lanes, it was the elected mayor, the concern is that that changes are being made whilst the disruption continues - for example the justification for rerouting the 436 was due to falling demand, yet there are still active ongoing roadworks/diversions in Lewisham (since January 2015), Victoria (since June 2010) and Paddington (since August 2010, with various changes), so there is no baseline to compare traffic levels with 'normal'.
Well it is and a thining out of buses is long overdue. And if the result is also to save cash for TfL that could be spent on other things, so be it.
Fact is that no bus service should ever be set in stone. The network always needs review. And Oxford Street in particular, is long overdue changes
From 2018 your over-60s railcard will allow you to get a ticket direct to Bond Street without getting off at Paddington or using any bus at all.
The original tram tunnel would have severe shortcomings as a maintenance depot. Barely wide enough for two trams to pass each other, there would be no space to work on any tram that required attention.
In comparison, Waterloo depot on the Waterloo & City line, which has severe operating constraints despite only having five trains (20 cars) to look after, looks positively palatial.
<snip>
dg writes: Deleted for 'reasons'.
If I remember right, the north-west entrance to Tott Ct Rd station won't be restored. The resulting mass of bodies crossing Oxford Street causes jams for east-west traffic, and as result the northbounds miss their turn. It's a horrible bus ride or walk up past Foyles these days.
Depot space north of King's X or west of Nine Elms..
would pay for itself within a decade..
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