My local express runs non-stop from a transport hub to its first destination, meaning it gets there in 13 minutes compared to the 30 minutes on the stopping service.
This saving is not achieved by missing out bus stops or using bus lanes or any other priority measures, all of which are already used by all local services. It is achieved by taking an entirely different route, using high speed urban dual carriageway and other recent urban road improvements designed in the main to speed cars on their way past and around traditional bus roads.
The service is hugely popular, with savvy passengers these days using bustimes (because traffic means the timetables for both services are usually fictional at peak times) to decide that yes, it's often worth your while to wait in situ for ten minutes, rather than get on the stopper and wait even longer in transit.
I strongly suspect it only has the loads it does, not because it is serving some hugely in demand handful of destination stops at the other end like some quasi urban rapid transit, but instead once it has finished its high speed run, becomes a bog standard ordinary bus service calling at all the stops the stopper does, serving an office park, light industry, local high streets, schools, a shopping centre and housing estate roads.
Every single passenger on that service benefits, with the person at the very end of the line having saved 17 minutes, with those getting off first having miraculously more than halved their journey time.
This is a commercial bus service serving an area of ample car ownership but in a place where parking is expensive and time consuming to reach. There is also a suburban rail option that covers most of the route but which presumably is less attractive for reasons of cost and time, requiring as it does a transfer to a local bus for the last leg of any nominal equivalent journey.
The operator has clearly thought hard about where people want to go, what is important to them, and what they can achieve in an environment where the local authority is at best, ambivalent to doing anything that would help buses compete with trains or cars.
The service isn't specially branded, uses bog standard deckers, and uses the standard fare system. The hub waiting area is nothing special, with the usual charming scenes of British urbanity.
Other than the X, you might have no clue it was an amazingly useful service, as you honk your way through town in your Chelsea Tractor.
The operator is clearly making enough money to sustain a 6am to 6pm express service even though it requires three buses and their drivers, scarce resources that could be deployed on other duties, with their core urban routes always in need of anything that might help maintain impressively high frequency headways that sadly crumble at the first sign of a temporary traffic light or a forklift truck!?!? unloading a 40 tonne!??!! lorry in a mixed retail/domestic street whose loading bays, if they even exist and are legal to use at these peak times, are full 24 hours a day due to what I am sure must be Uber drivers hanging out between fares.
I somehow doubt Mayor Khaaaaan! has at his disposal what it takes to get this level of advantage for the humble bus passenger. He may even struggle to achieve this level of benefit even though in so many ways he has so many more advantages.
The very fact he seems to think branding is key, suggests not. One of the many advantages of this express service of course being that for the vast majority of passengers, they don't start their journey at that hub. They arrive there via other means, a large proportion of which come by buses operated by that very same operator, seeing this express as an integral part of the network.
There are other express routes in the network, where the same advantages can be had. They are not even remotely used to serve airports or out of town retail parks, to the point it seems like a deliberate choice on the part of the operator not to waste five minutes getting passengers closer to their doors when there is ample train/car provision. There isn't one serving the only non-central hospital (the central one being a ten minute wall from the hub), because whether by accident of local geography or good use of yellow lines, the ordinary stopper reaches the hub in 15 minutes, while also giving a seamless connection to far flung estates the other side of the hub.
And even though it's quite a busy place, as hubs tend to be, I strongly suspect that recent improvements in urban cycleways and secure cycle storage has probably increased ridership, especially for students crammed into new build central accommodation blocks which aren't exactly convenient for light industrial temp work out in the boonies, even though, of course, all those improvements have largely been aimed at rail passengers or people assumed to be only making short journeys by bike alone.
tfl.gov.uk
