please empty your brain below

Why only earlier this morning I read from a reader's letter in a recent ES that the pending curtailment of route 19 (DG passim) severing its south London connectivity will require said reader no less than four bus journeys to replicate the journey lost. I cut it out to research if this was indeed true but obviously haven't had time yet.
Are you allowed to cross the road?

dg writes: Absolutely.
What about Sundays?, apart from April '71 through to October '78 the 9 and 10 would have met at Aldgate on this day until January '81. The 9 and 8 crossed paths at Bank, unfortunately the 7 didn't run again on Sundays until April '81.
A complementary question: how many orphaned normal bus routes are there that don't intersect with any other routes? "Normal", to me, would exclude the 23A for example.
35 to Camberwell - 36 to Peckham - 37 to Putney

47 & 48 link around the Liverpool Street area.

76 & 77 around the Waterloo area.

Leave the rest up to you guys. Difficult challenge overall.
I'm confused that "No long walks are allowed". How long is too long?

Surely two bus routes do NOT connect together if they don't use the same stop. How long a walk are you allowing ... ??
I'm allowing interchange if two routes cross or overlap. For example, route 23 and route 24 cross in Trafalgar Square, but you have to walk across the Square to change buses.

If only buses that share the same stop are allowed, the longest chain is 173/174/175 in Dagenham, end of story.
I assumed the rule was that the stops must have the same name.

dg writes: I'm allowing interchange if two routes cross or overlap.
As far as I can see, you can still get printed bus maps from http://www.busmap.co.uk
Theoretically you could do 648 - 649 - 650 - 651. But it would involve waiting several hours (including overnight) between buses. And in any case I'm not mad enough to want to ride one Romford school bus, let alone four.
During 1976 I commuted from Putney Bridge to Alexandra Palace by bus. Two routes, one change. Fat chance now.
Putney Bridge to Alexandra Palace (well, Wood Green) is still two routes, one change.

14 to Tottenham Court Road, then the 29.
There are about 400 non-lettered routes. Even if an average route met fifty others (surely an overestimate?), if they were randomly distributed you would expect only one route in eight to meet the route numbered one higher than itself. So statistically you would expect 400/8 = 50 such pairs, about six (400/8x8)runs of three, odds of better than 3 to 1 on there being a sequence of four, and only a 10% chance of there being a sequence of five.
Well, it is undoubtedly still possible to take buses with ten different numbers, one after the other, without taking a long walk in between any of them. But not ten buses with consecutive numbers.

Apart from it being a curious intellectual puzzle (and nothing wrong with that) why should it matter if the numbers are consecutive or not?
@Geofftech @dg

With regards to bus interchanges, would you define the following as an interchange?

27/73 at Warren Street (glancing blows off each other at the same intersection, not actually crossing - Marylebone Road/Hampstead Road on the 27, Tottenham Court Road/Euston Road on the 73)

176/159 at Trafalgar Square (both serve the square, but there's no particular location that both buses drive over - Charing Cross Road/Strand on the 176, Regent Street/Whitehall on the 159)

dg writes: Probably yes. But they're not consecutive, so in this case not relevant.
Putney to AP? How *long* did/does *that* take?
Not just 22 and 23 consec' - 47/48 (and a sneaky (1)49 too?) but also 242 and 243 between Shoreditch and Dalston, 253 and 254 (Hackney Central - Holloway), and if time travel is allowed at Hackney it would have been possible to see/use 253-4-5-6-7 at the same stops but sadly not at the same time. Bit off-beam but worth chucking in? (Also 6-7-8-9 at Bank).
So far we've got...

5 buses: 22/23/24/25/26
4 buses: none
3 buses: 35/36/37, 173/174/175, 343/344/345
2 buses: several

When the 25 is curtailed, the longest consecutive chain looks like being only 3 buses.
@David

These days, two hours on a good run, longer if not a particularly good one... but given doing that commute in an hour by trains is serious good luck two ain't bad.
Remember that the 23 is also being cut back from Aldwych to Marble Arch next Friday... so the 22-26 won't work anyway.

dg writes: Post updated, thanks.
You could make an argument that you should try and limit similar route numbers appearing near each other to avoid potential confusion (this would apply not only to consecutive numbers but also to transpositions such as 235/253/325 etc).

I was sceptical that you could actually ride all the R routes consecutively without riding any bus to its terminus and back, which would break the chain by being two services with the same number... but checking the spider maps and it's not only possible, but simple. All the odd-numbered Rs run between stop H and stop R, and all the evens run back from stop S to stop J, apart from the R2 where you'd have to walk round the corner to stop N to catch it.
This chain will be altered from Saturday the 24th.You will have to change from the 22 to the 23 between Knightsbridge & Hyde Park Corner when the 23 is diverted to Hammersmith.
Got a 5 route chain in the Kingston area for you.
K1 Kingston Cromwell Road to Surbiton Station.
K2.Surbiton Station to Kingston Hospital.
K3.Kingston Hospital to Surbiton Sainsburys.
K4. Surbiton Sainsburys to Kingston Cromwell Road.
K5.Kingston Cromwell Road to either Morden or Ham.
Snag for the statistics, I don't think bus route numbers are randomly distributed. The lower numbers seem to me to be more likely than the higher ones to cross central London. (This might be for historical reasons).
Outside London, much longer chains exist. But this probably does not mean much.
Three more triples, but nothing longer (and two of them are stretching a point)

160/161/162 all run along Chislehurst High Street

196/197/198 - the 196 terminates on the west side of Norwood Junction station, the 197 calls on the east side. The 197 and 198 meet in Croydon

230/231/232 all meet at Turnpike Lane station.

160/161/162
A complete cheat but you could get a chain between the W11, W12, W13, W14, W15 and W16 by starting in Walthamstow and heading to South Woodford / Wanstead then Leytonstone and a change in Leyton.

I suspect similar cheats are feasible in Uxbridge, Harrow and Orpington with the "U", "H" and "R" prefix routes.
There is no U6 or U8, but you can do the other U routes in sequence, and even go round again as the U10 meets the U1

H9-19 is broken into a sequence of five and another of three, because the H13 does not meet the H14 and the H15 and H16 no longer operate.
There’s a good article about the history of London bus route numbering here.
A variation of this could be to ride bus routes without having to have their line numbers in any order, but you can only change at the end points of each line.

How many buses can you ride then?

Every line that has one endpoint at a place where no other line has an endpoint is automatically ruled out, except for the first and last leg of the ride.










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