please empty your brain below

Taking a bus is a deceptively easy way of navigating Joydens Wood. For the stranger driving a car it was always an infuriatingly difficult place to cross, if driving between Dartford and Bexley Village. It's full of dead ends, circular roads and false leads - the joke used to be that those who lived there weren't keen on strangers entering their territory.Back in the 1980s there were also still a number of unadopted, rough-surface roads, adding to the driving challenge.
Teensy bit of Bond trivia on the B12. As you head out to Joydens Wood, at Dartford Road, there's a turning called Wansunt Lane; this is where Roger Moore lived with actress Dorothy Squires when they married in the 60s. Her house burned down, sadly - nothing left to see any more!
Entirely unrelated, but the reversing loop reminded me - in Calcutta, the entire city's one-way system works in one direction between 7am-2pm and then switches at 2pm-7pm. Between the 7s it's a free for all. Don't ever get in a cab at 1.50pm in Calcutta. Sorry. Back to business ...
This whole AM/PM loop stuff feels like they simply couldn't decide which way to go round! Sure there must be a better explanation (something to do with schools/commutes perhaps?)
In all the reading-up I've done in the past few weeks, the closest I've seen to an explanation for the direction-switching loop was on London Bus Routes' history of the B15 - which was the route which encompassed the Bexleyheath-Joydens Wood section of what's now the B12 route prior to January 2009. It simply says the arrangement was put in place "to minimise journey times for the majority of passengers". Considering completing the entire loop takes little over 10 minutes, the arrangement does seem very strange - why maintain twice as many bus stops as would otherwise be necessary, and have to publish excessively complicated timetables and make the route harder to understand, just to save a 'majority' of passengers up to ten minutes? It's surprising it hasn't been reconsidered in the past 22 years really!

Incidentally, LB Bexley had long been lobbying for an extension of the route from Bexley Park to Crayford (presumably across the A2 bridge at Dartford Heath), and had for years grouped this together with the Sunday service campaign as a single item in the quarterly council transport meetings I was attending in the public gallery. The Crayford extension - which might have offered a chance to remove the loop working and simply terminate in Crayford, then go back the other way, I guess - has been absent from the meetings since TfL's sudden hints of likely success in the Sunday service campaign. I guess it looks better to have achieved exactly what you were asking for rather than only one of two things you were asking for - albeit by far the more important one (IMO at least).

Good write-up as ever DG! Yours, slightly B12-obsessively, Paul ;)
I know of two bus routes near Oxford (one connecting various villages with Oxford: the other is the section of a longer route between Didcot and Wantage) that take different routes in the morning and afternoon, effectively making them loops (in both cases rather more extensive, and across a wider, mostly rural area, than the B12). In those cases I think it is a question of maximising passenger flow – i.e. responding to the major commuter flows to workplaces and schools. But the Joydens Wood case seems a bit less readily explicable, given the small size of the loop in question…
From 1968 to 1977, LT ran a circular route 284 round Potters Bar. During the morning peak it ran anticlockwise, the main traffic being from the residential areas north of the town centre to the station, and from the station (and the northern estates) to the employment areas around Mutton Lane. The service changed direction in mid-morning.

It was run with a single bus, and its claim to fame was that, for several years, it was the home of the FRM (the experimental rear-engined Routemaster).
Most trains on the Melbourne 'City Loop' switch direction between the morning and afternoon (depending on the ultimate origin or destination of the train when it swings off the loop).
Another route in London that follows a similar AM/PM pattern is the KU2, one of the shuttle buses that Kingston Uni kindly provides so that its students never have to walk more than a few yards.
The thrice-daily 162 bus in South Devon which serves a loop between Kingsbridge and Hope Cove also visits the same places but in a different order before and after lunch.
Interesting article DG - I did this route around the loop once, but didn't get off!

One other route in London with a bifurication is the 283 - running to Barnes Wetland Centre during the day, branching off to Barnes Pond out of business hours. School routes 609 and 686 also branch off into two over the course of the day. Few, if any other routes in London have a bifurication, not including those that circumvent industrial/shopping/anti-social residential areas at certain times of day.
As Paul's link to the B15 page suggests, the original B15 route was bewildering with some journeys running to the old Bexley Hospital, some running via the hospital before going to Joydens Wood and some just going to Joydens Wood. However, the morning peak service ran clockwise around the loop, with the reverse in the evening. I believe the reason for this was to minimise the journey time for passengers going to and from Bexley station.
When I lived at 20, Woodlands Park on the Estate from the age of 2 to 10 (1954 - 62)the bus that (sort of) served us was the 401 to Sevenoaks, which could be caught at Baldwyn's Park, right on the county boundary and a good mile or more away. As my father was a naval officer and my mother couldn't drive, all four of us ( I had 2 brothers) had to troop down to Baldwyn's in all weathers from the age of two onwards to shop in Bexley or Dartford, or to see the dentist or doctor in Bexley.Naturally, we had to carry all the shopping home. After we'd left the Estate the route was changed to one that penetrated the Estate right up to within 400 yards of our former home !Incidentally, both Mick Jagger and Keith Richards attended my old school, Maypole County Primary opposite Bexley Mental Hospital. Both institutions are now no more.










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