TFL & "Managed Decline"

[321over360]

There’s certainly an over supply of buses in certain areas, and I’d certainly agree over the Oxford St situation.

central london has too many buses and needs to be reduced, just look at Regents St, Oxford St and London Bridge during the day, it a line of Red Buses mostly

 

[SynthD]

What about that shows it’s too many?

 

[AlbertBeale]

central london has too many buses and needs to be reduced, just look at Regents St, Oxford St and London Bridge during the day, it a line of Red Buses mostly

The fact that cuts to routes and services in recent years mean that I often spend much longer out in the rain trying to move a mile or two from place to place around central London doesn't make me think there are too many buses! On the contrary, at many times of day more are needed. What there are too many of are selfish, anti-social, dangerous and unnecessary private cars (including "mini-cabs").

 

[43066]

What there are too many of are selfish, anti-social, dangerous and unnecessary private cars (including "mini-cabs").

I think you mean taxis.

 

[dan5324]

The fact that cuts to routes and services in recent years mean that I often spend much longer out in the rain trying to move a mile or two from place to place around central London doesn't make me think there are too many buses! On the contrary, at many times of day more are needed. What there are too many of are selfish, anti-social, dangerous and unnecessary private cars (including "mini-cabs").

Just because it takes you longer, doesn’t mean there aren’t enough buses. The vast majority are empty. Places like the strand, London Bridge, Victoria, Golders Green etc etc. Also, who on earth are you to say someone’s transport choice is “unnecessary”?

A big increase in journey times can be blamed on Tfl themselves. Their idiotic street space schemes, roundabout removals, overzealous cycle lanes, lane reductions and poor traffic light timings have all come together to make everyone’s journey take longer, which puts people off buses and this justifies cuts.

 

[Mawkie]

A big increase in journey times can be blamed on Tfl themselves. Their idiotic street space schemes, roundabout removals, overzealous cycle lanes, lane reductions and poor traffic light timings have all come together to make everyone’s journey take longer, which puts people off buses and this justifies cuts.

Has there been a big increase in journey times? TfL's stats say Buses mph has very slightly increased in the last 3 years (not surprising given the recent covid restrictions). Bus mph has hovered around the 9-10mph mark for as long as I remember.

What is more startling in the stats is the excess waiting times for buses in London. The significant drop in EWT around 2000 seems to coincide with the creation of the Greater London Authority, although the plateau since 2005/6 might indicate that buses are now as reliable as they can be in London?

Buses performance data

Network performance statistics and customer feedback can tell us a lot about how well our bus services are operating - and what we can do to improve them

tfl.gov.uk

 

[rebmcr]

Just because it takes you longer, doesn’t mean there aren’t enough buses. The vast majority are empty. Places like the strand, London Bridge, Victoria, Golders Green etc etc. Also, who on earth are you to say someone’s transport choice is “unnecessary”?

A big increase in journey times can be blamed on Tfl themselves. Their idiotic street space schemes, roundabout removals, overzealous cycle lanes, lane reductions and poor traffic light timings have all come together to make everyone’s journey take longer, which puts people off buses and this justifies cuts.

Who on earth are you to say someone’s street space scheme is “idiotic”?

 

[AlbertBeale]

I think you mean taxis.

No - I mean mini-cabs; taxis are an important part of the public transport system.

Has there been a big increase in journey times? TfL's stats say Buses mph has very slightly increased in the last 3 years (not surprising given the recent covid restrictions). Bus mph has hovered around the 9-10mph mark for as long as I remember.

What is more startling in the stats is the excess waiting times for buses in London. The significant drop in EWT around 2000 seems to coincide with the creation of the Greater London Authority, although the plateau since 2005/6 might indicate that buses are now as reliable as they can be in London?

Buses performance data

Network performance statistics and customer feedback can tell us a lot about how well our bus services are operating - and what we can do to improve them

tfl.gov.uk

I'm not talking about the times of bus journeys, but passenger journeys: curtailed routes, fewer routes, and less frequent services, can mean that my end-to-end journey takes much much longer even if each individual bus isn't any slower. TfL figures on bus journey times are avoiding the issue of passengers being slowed down by bus cuts.

Just because it takes you longer, doesn’t mean there aren’t enough buses. The vast majority are empty. Places like the strand, London Bridge, Victoria, Golders Green etc etc. Also, who on earth are you to say someone’s transport choice is “unnecessary”?

A big increase in journey times can be blamed on Tfl themselves. Their idiotic street space schemes, roundabout removals, overzealous cycle lanes, lane reductions and poor traffic light timings have all come together to make everyone’s journey take longer, which puts people off buses and this justifies cuts.

The idea that the vast majority of buses are empty isn't the case when I'm out and about - that's just a myth. It is true that at times of day when there's a lot of people going one way and not the other, then the buses on the "return" leg are very lightly loaded; unfortunately, logic requires that transport goes in both directions, even if most people are going one way. The real waste of resources and space (and trashing of the environment and resources) are the street after street of parked cars all over London, which are sitting there completely empty for 95% of the time. Compared to them, a bus which is out and about carrying people around for most of the day, even with only a few passengers at some times, is a far more efficient use of space and resources than any private car.

 

[Egg Centric]

A means-tested discount on all modes, not just bus, should then be made available for those on Universal Credit, rather than making buses cheap for everyone. This is also more progressive in that you're not making the bus network an inferior option for poor people, you're making the whole network available to them at a price they can afford.

This sounds nice in isolation but one of the great flaws with Universal Credit is that it perversely imposes what is essentially a 70% marginal tax on the poorest due to the tapering. The more benefits you give to those on it the worse this gets to the point where people are actually worse off as they progress in career/pay.

If you insist on means testing you need to do it in a smarter way otherwise you are just keeping the poor “stuck poor”.

 

[Bletchleyite]

This sounds nice in isolation but one of the great flaws with Universal Credit is that it perversely imposes what is essentially a 70% marginal tax on the poorest due to the tapering. The more benefits you give to those on it the worse this gets to the point where people are actually worse off as they progress in career/pay.

If you insist on means testing you need to do it in a smarter way otherwise you are just keeping the poor “stuck poor”.

That was just an example, so maybe a different scheme would be more sensible, or maybe Universal Credit needs fixing! But my point was it's better that those who need to pay less can pay less on the entire system and those who can pay more do, than that the bus should be treated as some kind of "peasant wagon" as I sometimes hear people unkindly call it but the Tube be out of their means.

 

[domcoop7]

and you don't think this has anything to do with the City / financial services being based in London, and to a large extent earning profits from exported services?

Yes, that's my point. So why should, e.g. a hospital ward not get built in Truro, to give funding to TfL, so they can have sufficient money to allow some teenagers in Purley free bus travel to get to Croydon, because HSBC's head office is in Canary Wharf?

 

[WAB]

Good start.

It's very notable that the single bus fare was £2.00 at the end of cash, though some will have used Saver tickets in my experience most didn't, so it has actually even with this increase gone down not just in real terms but in numbers terms too!

Well they couldn't have managed the transition to Oyster with higher fares - First in Leeds will learn that to their cost where their Tap On Tap Off system is rather more expensive than paper and mobile tickets.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Well they couldn't have managed the transition to Oyster with higher fares - First in Leeds will learn that to their cost where their Tap On Tap Off system is rather more expensive than paper and mobile tickets.

No, but 10p cheaper would have probably worked.

 

[MikeWh]

No, but 10p cheaper would have probably worked.

But I think you may have underestimated the useage of saver tickets. If they'd put the Oyster fare higher than the saver then it would have flopped.

 

[dan5324]

No - I mean mini-cabs; taxis are an important part of the public transport system.




I'm not talking about the times of bus journeys, but passenger journeys: curtailed routes, fewer routes, and less frequent services, can mean that my end-to-end journey takes much much longer even if each individual bus isn't any slower. TfL figures on bus journey times are avoiding the issue of passengers being slowed down by bus cuts.




The idea that the vast majority of buses are empty isn't the case when I'm out and about - that's just a myth. It is true that at times of day when there's a lot of people going one way and not the other, then the buses on the "return" leg are very lightly loaded; unfortunately, logic requires that transport goes in both directions, even if most people are going one way. The real waste of resources and space (and trashing of the environment and resources) are the street after street of parked cars all over London, which are sitting there completely empty for 95% of the time. Compared to them, a bus which is out and about carrying people around for most of the day, even with only a few passengers at some times, is a far more efficient use of space and resources than any private car.

Nice movement of the posts there. Surprise surprise but a parked up bus is about as much of waste as a parked car. A moving car on the other hand..

 

[AlbertBeale]

Nice movement of the posts there. Surprise surprise but a parked up bus is about as much of waste as a parked car. A moving car on the other hand..

The point is that buses spend a large proportion of their time moving and carrying people. Cars spend 95% of their time parked up and cluttering up the space for the rest of us - they're literally a waste of space. Hence the environmental disaster (incuding embedded resources) of widespread car use (indeed of car ownership) is far worse than just the use of energy (etc) resources when actually carrying people (and that's bad enough!).

 

[Horizon22]

Nice movement of the posts there. Surprise surprise but a parked up bus is about as much of waste as a parked car. A moving car on the other hand..

Specific to London (and other big cities), cars are generally a waste of space due to the time spent actually being utilised, the disproprtionate impact they have on congestion and the environmental impact Outside of cities, then yes individualised motor vehicles have a part to play. Buses have long diagrams and are used much more than the average car and carry more people.

 

[The Ham]

Nice movement of the posts there. Surprise surprise but a parked up bus is about as much of waste as a parked car. A moving car on the other hand..

A moving car on average carries less than 1.5 people, depending on the reason for travel it's typically between 1.2 and 1.4.

A single bus carrying just 8 people will likely be taking up the road space of two cars, yet carries the equivalent of about 5 cars worth of people.

Let's assume that a bus makes one return trip carrying 8 people each way and then it's parked for the rest of the day, it's still taking up less space than if you had 3 cars carrying the same people (which would require then to be carrying above average the number of people at 2.67/vehicle).

However most buses will do several return trips over the course of a day and likely carrying an average of more than 8, as such they are likely to remove significant numbers of cars from being parked and from traveling about.

One of the biggest cause of cost increase to bus companies is traffic congestion, as they need to run more buses to maintain the same frequency.

Electric cars take up exactly the same space as an ICE vehicle. Automation may reduce breaking distances a little, however at about 25mph cutting the reaction time from 2 seconds to 1 second reduces the road space required for a car from 25m to 15m.

Over 1km that's a net benefit of an extra 67% of cars. However in the last decade we've increases car usage by circa 25% and that unless we can have automated cars reliably running soon it's not going to take significant growth in car usage to offset those improvements.

Whilst in theory every car could run with fractious of a second between them, to do so would likely require real-time communication between cars so that the following car knows that the one in front is about to undertake an emergency stop. Otherwise you'd need some margin of error (say 1 second) for the following car to react.

There's two other key factors, firstly the following car may have a slightly different breaking distance (which could just be down to the fact that it's carrying 4 people and some stuff, rather than just one person). Secondly good drivers learn to read the road ahead and sometimes have slowed a little when they spot something which may turn into a hazard, such a reduction in speed may not be all that much. However it can have a noticeable difference in the stopping distance (as fairly little speed is lost when breaking at higher speeds compared to lower speeds).

Given that 85% of people live in urban areas (an area with a population of over 10,000 people) where for many public transport should (at least in theory) be a viable option, yet there's still more cars than tax payers. Clearly something isn't working.

We've tried increasing road space, others have gone even further with lots of lanes of traffic, and it doesn't help. All that happens is that congestion reaches the same level, it's just that more people drive.

To reach 1/2 the average numbers of miles traveled by bike in 1950 we'd need to increase the account of cycling by a factor of 2.4. To even reach 25% of average number of miles traveled we'd still need to see a 20% increase.

Yes public transport, walking and cycling aren't suitable for every trip. However nor is going by car and yet far too many do so.

For example due to not being healthy enough by not doing enough exercise is adding significant costs to the money we have to be taxed to find the NHS.

There's many who complain about the amount that they pay in taxes on fuel, well here's a tax avoidance tip: walk a few miles extra each week (rather than drive). At the current circa 56% tax rate where I reduce my driving by about 10 miles a week I save myself £35 in tax each year. However that's only a fraction of the savings by not having to run a second car in the household (average annual car costs are over £3,000/year, however even for low milage it's unlikely to be that much below £1,000/year by the time you've accounted for purchase costs, VED, insurance, maintenance, fuel, etc.).

OK there's a time penalty, however it's very small especially on the days when there's ice on the cars (and because of the short distances actually it's colder to drive than walk). Yes there's days when the weather is bad, however it's possible for it not to be worth putting my hood up on my coat whilst cars have their wipers on constant, and the number of days it's worth putting waterproof trousers on I can count on one hand for the year.

Yes there's a lot of days when it rains, however quite a few will have rain when I'm not needing to be outside (for instance overnight, or whilst I'm working in the office). That's from the last decade where I've mostly been walking or cycling to get to work (with our without using rail for pay of the trip, depending on which company I was working for at the time).

I live in a rural settlement, (which whilst it does have an hourly bus service and a 2tph rail service, so not all that typically) which does demonstrate that reducing car use should be possible in most urban settings.

 

[Dstock7080]

Funding package extended until 25 February:
https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/p...fl-statement---tfl-funding-update-21st-februa

 

[Tube driver]

Bloody ridiculous that the can keeps being kicked down the road.

The mayor should just hand the keys back and let the DfT run it all. They’d soon crap themselves and sort out a proper long term deal in very short order.

 

[endicomark69@g]

Bloody ridiculous that the can keeps being kicked down the road.

The mayor should just hand the keys back and let the DfT run it all. They’d soon crap themselves and sort out a proper long term deal in very short order.

The current DfT Senior Muppets are so in the pocket of the current Junta we could expect "Franchising 2.0" to raise its ugly head again if it was plonked back at them, they literally would have no other idea/backup plan but flogging it.

This of course would mean that suddenly all the Subsidy asked for and needed would miraculously be available to them again..........just like for the TOCs.

 

[321over360]

Has there been a big increase in journey times? TfL's stats say Buses mph has very slightly increased in the last 3 years (not surprising given the recent covid restrictions). Bus mph has hovered around the 9-10mph mark for as long as I remember.

What is more startling in the stats is the excess waiting times for buses in London. The significant drop in EWT around 2000 seems to coincide with the creation of the Greater London Authority, although the plateau since 2005/6 might indicate that buses are now as reliable as they can be in London?

Buses performance data

Network performance statistics and customer feedback can tell us a lot about how well our bus services are operating - and what we can do to improve them

tfl.gov.uk

All London Buses seem to run slower now than they did 10 years ago, recently i used a 66 Bus from Newbury Park to Romford when traffic was light just before 7am, and the bus took around 20 minutes to do the journey, however years back, i did Romford to Newbury Park on a 66 bus in around 13 minutes with the bus doing a clear run, so buses are slower than ever, possibly down to the buses being forced to stick to their timetables which has slowed them down, or a Wright Gemini Bus built maybe 5 or so years ago, has a poorer speed ability to a Plaxton Pointer built 10 years before it

 

[Bletchleyite]

All London Buses seem to run slower now than they did 10 years ago, recently i used a 66 Bus from Newbury Park to Romford when traffic was light just before 7am, and the bus took around 20 minutes to do the journey, however years back, i did Romford to Newbury Park on a 66 bus in around 13 minutes with the bus doing a clear run, so buses are slower than ever, possibly down to the buses being forced to stick to their timetables which has slowed them down, or a Wright Gemini Bus built maybe 5 or so years ago, has a poorer speed ability to a Plaxton Pointer built 10 years before it

Increased prevalence of 20 limits will also have an effect.

 

[stuu]

All London Buses seem to run slower now than they did 10 years ago, recently i used a 66 Bus from Newbury Park to Romford when traffic was light just before 7am, and the bus took around 20 minutes to do the journey, however years back, i did Romford to Newbury Park on a 66 bus in around 13 minutes with the bus doing a clear run, so buses are slower than ever, possibly down to the buses being forced to stick to their timetables which has slowed them down, or a Wright Gemini Bus built maybe 5 or so years ago, has a poorer speed ability to a Plaxton Pointer built 10 years before it

You say that as if it's a bad thing? Buses a few minutes early is, generally, far worse for passengers than running a few minutes late

 

[Bletchleyite]

You say that as if it's a bad thing? Buses a few minutes early is, generally, far worse for passengers than running a few minutes late

Depends. On a half hourly route, absolutely. On a 5 minute frequency, say, it can be better to just run on headways and just feed in buses as required to maintain frequency based on varying traffic conditions.

 

[321over360]

Increased prevalence of 20 limits will also have an effect.

The route is predominantly on a 50mph road, then a 40mph with the rest 30mph, but yet the bus is now slower than it was a decade ago

You say that as if it's a bad thing? Buses a few minutes early is, generally, far worse for passengers than running a few minutes late

I would rather buses just kept moving along the route, not being stuck to stringent slow conditions, as if the bus is scheduled to be every say 10 minutes, it isnt really going to matter if it runs early cos if it comes 2 minutes early and the next one is 10 minutes behind it, you are only going to wait 8 minutes for the bus, and why would you not get to a bus stop a few minutes before the bus is due to arrive incase it ran early? Thats the thing, TFL has put so much onto buses, that they are nearly twice as slow as they used to be, like unneeded pauses along the route "to help regulate the service" even though the bus could sit there for 5 minutes yet passengers onboard may want to get somewhere

 

[Bletchleyite]

To me every 10 minutes is not enough to dispense with a timetable, so I disagree. TfL does operate headway style services from every 12, though, I believe, as ludicrously Metrolink does.

Yes, I aim to arrive at a bus stop just before the bus departs. Why would I want to stand in the cold and waste my time? If you don't operate to a published timetable, that adds between 1 and 9 minutes to the journey on a 10 minute frequency.

I wouldn't want headway operation on any less than 10 buses per hour.

 

[cactustwirly]

A moving car on average carries less than 1.5 people, depending on the reason for travel it's typically between 1.2 and 1.4.

A single bus carrying just 8 people will likely be taking up the road space of two cars, yet carries the equivalent of about 5 cars worth of people.

Let's assume that a bus makes one return trip carrying 8 people each way and then it's parked for the rest of the day, it's still taking up less space than if you had 3 cars carrying the same people (which would require then to be carrying above average the number of people at 2.67/vehicle).

However most buses will do several return trips over the course of a day and likely carrying an average of more than 8, as such they are likely to remove significant numbers of cars from being parked and from traveling about.

One of the biggest cause of cost increase to bus companies is traffic congestion, as they need to run more buses to maintain the same frequency.

Electric cars take up exactly the same space as an ICE vehicle. Automation may reduce breaking distances a little, however at about 25mph cutting the reaction time from 2 seconds to 1 second reduces the road space required for a car from 25m to 15m.

Over 1km that's a net benefit of an extra 67% of cars. However in the last decade we've increases car usage by circa 25% and that unless we can have automated cars reliably running soon it's not going to take significant growth in car usage to offset those improvements.

Whilst in theory every car could run with fractious of a second between them, to do so would likely require real-time communication between cars so that the following car knows that the one in front is about to undertake an emergency stop. Otherwise you'd need some margin of error (say 1 second) for the following car to react.

There's two other key factors, firstly the following car may have a slightly different breaking distance (which could just be down to the fact that it's carrying 4 people and some stuff, rather than just one person). Secondly good drivers learn to read the road ahead and sometimes have slowed a little when they spot something which may turn into a hazard, such a reduction in speed may not be all that much. However it can have a noticeable difference in the stopping distance (as fairly little speed is lost when breaking at higher speeds compared to lower speeds).

Given that 85% of people live in urban areas (an area with a population of over 10,000 people) where for many public transport should (at least in theory) be a viable option, yet there's still more cars than tax payers. Clearly something isn't working.

We've tried increasing road space, others have gone even further with lots of lanes of traffic, and it doesn't help. All that happens is that congestion reaches the same level, it's just that more people drive.

To reach 1/2 the average numbers of miles traveled by bike in 1950 we'd need to increase the account of cycling by a factor of 2.4. To even reach 25% of average number of miles traveled we'd still need to see a 20% increase.

Yes public transport, walking and cycling aren't suitable for every trip. However nor is going by car and yet far too many do so.

For example due to not being healthy enough by not doing enough exercise is adding significant costs to the money we have to be taxed to find the NHS.

There's many who complain about the amount that they pay in taxes on fuel, well here's a tax avoidance tip: walk a few miles extra each week (rather than drive). At the current circa 56% tax rate where I reduce my driving by about 10 miles a week I save myself £35 in tax each year. However that's only a fraction of the savings by not having to run a second car in the household (average annual car costs are over £3,000/year, however even for low milage it's unlikely to be that much below £1,000/year by the time you've accounted for purchase costs, VED, insurance, maintenance, fuel, etc.).

OK there's a time penalty, however it's very small especially on the days when there's ice on the cars (and because of the short distances actually it's colder to drive than walk). Yes there's days when the weather is bad, however it's possible for it not to be worth putting my hood up on my coat whilst cars have their wipers on constant, and the number of days it's worth putting waterproof trousers on I can count on one hand for the year.

Yes there's a lot of days when it rains, however quite a few will have rain when I'm not needing to be outside (for instance overnight, or whilst I'm working in the office). That's from the last decade where I've mostly been walking or cycling to get to work (with our without using rail for pay of the trip, depending on which company I was working for at the time).

I live in a rural settlement, (which whilst it does have an hourly bus service and a 2tph rail service, so not all that typically) which does demonstrate that reducing car use should be possible in most urban settings.

I live in an urban area, and public transport is completely unsuitable for my commute to work. It is also more expensive than driving.

If you want to push people out of the cars, it has to be genuinely attractive. At the moment buses are expensive and slow, and not much use unless you have no other choice.

I do a lot of walking, most trips into town I walk. I only use my car for distances over 5 miles, or when I go to the supermarket.

There is also a significant cost and time saving when driving long distances over the train, for example when travelling north I can avoid London.
Whereas taking the train I have to travel across it, adding 2 hours to the journey and lots of extra hassle.

 

[philthetube]

You say that as if it's a bad thing? Buses a few minutes early is, generally, far worse for passengers than running a few minutes late

Buses are monitored by control far more than they were 10 years ago, you often hear an announcement on a bus saying that the bus is going to wait a couple of minutes to regulate the service, that never used to happen, maybe drivers used to run early on your stretch in order to get a brew, and can no longer get away with it.

 

[matt_world2004]

Buses are monitored by control far more than they were 10 years ago, you often hear an announcement on a bus saying that the bus is going to wait a couple of minutes to regulate the service, that never used to happen, maybe drivers used to run early on your stretch in order to get a brew, and can no longer get away with it.

I bus also tells the driver exactly how far ahead on headway they are. The skilled drivers slow down slightly to lose a minute here or there.

There is also an incentive in the contract to bid for longer running times. You are fined if late .so you bid a longer running time to add redundancy and avoid being late.