please empty your brain below

To a Londoner, a £10 day "saver" ticket sounds like terrible value; and at the moment it probably is given the £2 cap on most bus fares across England. But I'm guessing that normally you could easily reach a tenner by buying three tickets, at which point it begins to make sense.
I remember the days when TfL had 4 bus zones and commuting from Leytonstone to Loughton for work on the 20, the last London bus had the 4/6 sign with a cross around it, and then the next bus sign into Loughton was an Essex County Council one. I always loved looking out for the signs in changes to and from London.

The council were so bad at maintaining their bus stops that TfL took them over all the way to Debden, with a blue roundel signalling the Essex boundary instead of London.
No roads in the area are maintained bu Epping Forest DC - that's a very London-centred view! All roads in Essex are maintained (or often not!) by Essex County Council - whose Highways supremo actually lives near the 275 bus route.

dg writes: tweaked, sorry.

By the way, you don't emerge at Woodford Green, this is Woodford Bridge, other than for mail purposes.

dg writes: tweaked, sorry.

Expression on the face of the driver? Most likely expressionless
Not for the first time I note that you have been slightly disparaging towards Walthamstow. Some of us have to live there!
An area I know well. I'm currently less than 1km from that Stradbroke Park bus stop. And yes, many of the houses in Tomswood Hill/Tomswood Road are large modern rebuilds. A lot of the original (and less ostentatious) 1950s houses and bungalows there have been demolished and replaced in the last decade or so.
A strange quirk of history that this corner of Essex escaped when the rest of metropolitan Essex joined London. Such an anomalous area.

You know you’ve reached the border when the cycle infrastructure stops and the potholes start.
The Essex Sunday Saver has been around for longer than the weekday equivalent - back as far as bus deregulation (outside London) in 1986, I think. Used it for some great journeys - including one in a Blue Triangle RT across Hatfield Heath - back in the 80s... The later spinning off of Thurrock and Southend as separate entities from Essex County Council reduced its utility a bit, but it's still a very useful ticket
On the descent (or ascent if you look behind) of Tomswood Hill you can see past amorphous suburbs to the Dartford Bridge and beyond from the top deck of a 275.
E11 - ECC were not bad at maintaining bus stops. They were actually mostly new, the original LT stops having been removed when the Traffic Signs Regs specified the roundel meant A bus stop in London; TfL signs replaced the standard ones only when that was changed to A bus stop served by Transport for London services, and the stops adapted for disabled access - I never found out who paid for that.
It was actually easier in that brief 10? year window to get missing stops replaced and demolished flags reinstated!
I'd rather live on the London side of the 275 route, and be entitled to a Freedom Pass when I turn 60.
Essex Saver? No, thanks!
Ah, March road budgets - that's probably why the bus stop outside my house is temporarily closed for a 4-way traffic light controlled roadworks! Very tedious indeed!
> …it’s in Essex… with bigger security gates, larger parking areas and lower council tax.

Not much in it, indeed I reckon council tax on the Redbridge side is currently nearly 2% less than the bill for houses in the same band over the border (£1468 Redbridge borough + £396 GLA = £1864 < £1899 = £47 Chigwell parish + £157 Epping Forest district + £1401 Essex county + £219 police + £75 fire for band D in 2022/23).

But things reverse on 1 April with Chigwell dwellers paying 0.1% less than those in the same Redbridge band (£47 Chigwell + £162 Epping Forest + £1451 Essex + £233 police + £80 fire = £1973 < £1976 = £1542 Redbridge + £434 GLA for band D in 2023/24).
Among the many pieces of misinformation put out in the local elections last year was that my borough had the highest council tax in the country. Despite the easily findable data that all but one of its neighbours over the border in Surrey had higher council taxes.
It turns out the Tomswood roadworks are Thames Water so nothing to do with council budgets!
Up north in Worcestershire they have a multi-operator bus ticket called Connecta. In their small print, you can't use the ticket if the route only enters the County for a short distance. I asked the Council if there was a definitive list of these exclusions, but there is not so it is up to interpretation what a short distance is. The equivalent to your 275 example I am confident would be not acceptable (two NXWM routes in Rubery serving about 4 stops mid route), but some other routes crossing the other borders are less clear cut.

Also, as am aside, the Connecta is also apparently available to purchase on the first bus you board - not if it doesn't use a ticket machine it isn't! Essex may not have that problem!
You're right about councils using up their budgets in March, dg. In the 1980s and early 1990s I used to work for a company with a large number of local authorities as customers, and March was always the month with by far the highest sales.
When I was young the hospital was still open and the 275 went all the way up the drive to a stop by the main building. At the time the drive had the only speed bumps that any bus route in the area encountered, so that was slightly exciting.
Looking at the Stradbroke Park bus stop makes me wonder what the official location of a bus stop actually is (as defined in TfL databases and/or online maps). Is it the location of the flag, which is in London, or the centre of the rectangle in which the bus actually stops, which is in Essex? Perhaps it should be the point where the doors open because that is the location where the pedestrian becomes passenger and vice versa - which would still just be on the Essex side, depending on how accurate the driver is.
Maybe this is pedantic, but as the 275 does not satisfy the “either starts or finishes in Essex” stipulation for cross boundary services then is your Essex saver even valid on it anyway?

Having had poor experiences with a perfectly valid herts intalink explorer on different companies buses I very much doubt a TFL 275 driver would accept one when they don’t issue them ever anyway… Can anyone actually verify that they have tried to use one and been successful??










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