Why is TfL always ‘in denial’ about strikes affecting its services?
26 March 2022
ABOVE: Arriva’s HV318, LK17 AJO in Vauxhall Bridge Road on Tuesday 22nd March, on a service that may or may not be running on 28th and 29th March.
This is a rant, and I make no apologies for it being one! It concerns a forthcoming strike by bus drivers of Arriva London South this coming week.
Let me be clear, first of all, that I’m not going to comment on my views as to the rights and wrongs of the strike itself. This rant – sorry, opinion piece – is about how the customers are informed about the possible disruption, by that model of high-quality customer focus that is Transport for London (TfL).
Arriva drivers called three days of strike action for 21st, 28th & 29th March. The first I knew about this was when TfL’s weekly “Weekend Travel Advice” email popped into my inbox on Thursday 17th March. Buried at the bottom, after the advice about London Underground, London Overground, TfL Rail, Docklands Light Railway and River services, was a notification about this strike.
Now five days’ warning might seem OK, but Arriva must have been aware of this threatened strike since 7th March, as unions are required to give 14 days’ notice (unless the union and employer agree to seven days; agreement seems unlikely). Arriva will have been required to tell TfL pretty quickly, and I would have expected TfL to then tell us, its customers.
So why, if the decision has been notified on 7th March, is it 10 days before TfL informs its customers, and then in such an understated way? Even on 17th, there was nothing on the home page of the TfL website to warn intending passengers.
As it happens, the first strike was called off on Friday 18th March, but a 48-hour stoppage, scheduled for Monday 28th and Tuesday 29th is, as I write this in the late afternoon of Saturday 26th, expected to go ahead.
There was warning again in last Thursday’s “Weekend Travel Advice” email, and there’s a link to information. But there is nothing, even now, on the TfL Home Page:
ABOVE: Screenshot from TfL’s website home page (mobile version) taken on Saturday 26th March. No mention here of the forthcoming Arriva bus strike.
Not everybody receives these weekly emails (even if you are a subscriber they sometimes don’t turn up).
To find the advice, you need to know the address of the page to go to (which rolls off the tongue as https://tfl.gov.uk/campaign/bus-strike?cid=bus-strikehttps://tfl.gov.uk/campaign/bus-strike?cid=bus-strike).
But you also need to know that you need to look for the advice. And this is where TfL is failing its customers. Unless you are specifically looking for information, which means that you already know about the strike, you’re not going to find anything, until a few days beforehand, when it may be too late to alter whatever plans you might have put in place.
If you plan a journey on the website that involves one of the affected routes, you will see a “Status Alert” which will, if you click on it, warn of the forthcoming strikes. But again, you need to know that you have to look.
There’s nothing else to tell you that anything might be wrong. So if you plan a journey that does not involve any of the affected routes, nothing comes up. Not even if there are six routes down a particular road and, while yours is OK, all of the other five are affected.
A search for the phrase “Bus Strike” on the website brings up the Tube Strikes that are continuing to affect the Night Tube, but nothing about this strike:
It’s not just buses. Where Tube strikes get called, there is usually media coverage, but even then, there is complete silence from the organisation that is supposed to be responsible for transport across the capital until close to the time, presumably in the hope that the problem will go away.
A few days before the first of the recent tube strikes, and before anything was published on the home page, I planned a journey on the TfL website to see what happened. The journey planner would not return any information about tube services, but would not explain why. Clearly, all tube journeys had been taken out of the planner, on the basis that they would not be running, but there were no clues to explain why ‘odd’ results, or in some cases, no results, were being returned.
Below is the home page of TfL’s Home Page, as it was early on the morning of Thursday 24th March. No mention of the bus strike. Also no mention of the Night Tube strikes on the nights of Fri 25th / Sat 26th; nor of a strike affecting the Woolwich Ferry on Friday 25th and Monday 28th (oh and none of this comes up under “Major works and events” either).
Only a couple of days beforehand will TfL admit that something is up, and even then it is reticent about exactly what is going on and gives at-best, patchy, and at-worst, incomplete or ambiguous information. For example, the weekly email says that “up to 36 services” will be disrupted, but the web page lists only 30 routes. What about the other six?
There’s no mention of the effects in central London, which routes 2 and 137 serve. These services will probably be missed less in the centre, but TfL would have you believe that only local services are affected. It would also be nice if the information made clear that Arriva London North services are, presumably, unaffected. Not everyone can distinguish between different Arriva operations (see below for an example)!
TfL’s web information, especially for buses, is awful. It’s clear from the word go that buses are very low down the pecking order and it is one of the worst websites of its kind. I may need to write about this more generally sometime.
I really would like TfL to up its game and advise of potential strikes, prominently on its home page, as soon as they are known about. But I’m not holding my breath.
Incidentally, I note that the BBC London website is now carrying the story, but the buses it has chosen to illustrate the story with are not London buses – not even red ones… To be honest, it’s as bad as using a picture of an Arriva London (North) and an RATP bus to illustrate a story about Metroline, as someone did a few weeks ago)…
ABOVE: BBC London news story: any picture will do, as long as it has the word “Arriva” on the bus!