The London Express
23 April 2022
ABOVE: Go-Ahead London Central MHV 57 (BV66 VKH), a Volvo B5LH MCV EvoSeti, turns out of Waterloo Road, at London Waterloo station, into Baylis Road, working limited stop route X68 to West Croydon, on Friday 1st April 2022
Although prevalent in other British cities, London has never really been successful in making express / limited stop bus services work on a large scale. Whilst there are some short non-stop sections on certain routes (eg, route 96 to Bluewater or route A10 into Heathrow), there are currently only four Express routes on the Transport for London (TfL) network that are marketed as such:
- 607 (White City to Uxbridge)
- X26 (West Croydon to Heathrow Airport)
- X68 (West Croydon to Russell Square)
- X140 (Heathrow Airport to Harrow)
ABOVE: Go-Ahead WVL 343 (LX59 DFC) is unusually quiet on this early afternoon working on route X26 at Hatton Cross, on Tuesday 29th March 2022. The X26 is the only one of the four TfL Express services not to acknowledge on its blinds that it is limited stop. Does that ever catch people out, I wonder?
So why is this? I’m prompted to ask as TfL is apparently looking at a new express route for the Old Kent Road. This is contained in its verbose Bus Action Plan, and suggests that TfL is “reviewing high-frequency corridors to identify where we could trial limited stop services, beginning with … options for Old Kent Road in 2022”.
The problem with express bus services is that their very raison d’être will annoy customers. Introduce an express service onto an existing route and you will annoy those whose stops are not part of the new service. Unless you can find a quicker route to use, you risk alienating all of the intermediate passengers who will see the express bus go by. It’s cold, it’s raining, and that bus that just went by – or worse still, is sitting in traffic right next to you – has space on it and is going where you want to go. But you can’t use it.
Split a route into a stopper and an express and you’re replacing one decent-frequency service with two lower-frequency services. The X140 is apparently regarded as the model of how express buses can work successfully in London. It runs every 12 minutes, but, for those on the Bath Road and in the Harlington area, the alternative stopping service 278 (Heathrow to Ruislip) runs only every 15 minutes.
The old 140, which still parallels the X140 between Harrow and Hayes, ran every eight minutes and covered all the bases of both the X140 and the 278. And the X140 from Hayes to Heathrow, on a Saturday afternoon, is only three minutes quicker than the 278. If it comes first. (Source: Timetables on the London Bus Routes website.)
ABOVE: RATP London Sovereign VHR 45206 (LJ66 EZR) on route X140, and Abellio E400 2008 (SN69 ZRP) on route 278, represent the fast and slow ways respectively to travel between Hayes Town and Heathrow Airport. The RATP vehicle is one of six Wright SRM hybrid vehicles based on the New Routemaster design, but shorter and with the more normal two sets of doors and single staircase. Some of these SRMs provide ‘charge’ cover for the electric vehicles which make up the official allocation. Picture taken at Harlington Corner on Tuesday 29th March 2022.
To achieve a substantial journey time improvement, you need to skip a lot of stops and have clear, fast roads that you can traverse quickly, at a reasonable speed.
There are routes elsewhere in the country that are entirely designed on the basis of using fast roads – the CityZap Leeds to York service, Trent Barton’s red arrow between Derby and Nottingham, or the X43 Manchester to Burnley Witchway route, for example. All of these have significant non-stop sections, using motorways to speed them to their destinations.
Cities like Birmingham and Bristol have motorways that end right in the City Centre, so it is easy to create services that can quickly put a few miles between the city and the suburbs, leaving the inner areas to other routes.
The problem is that London is much bigger, and there are few opportunities to zip straight onto the nearest motorway for a few miles. Most fast London roads do not penetrate into the real heart of the city, so local, crowded roads are necessary to complete a journey. There’s too much short-distance traffic to create sustainable express services along roads like these. Far better to improve the existing service than to create a competing new one.
And, to my mind, that’s the key. Express routes work best when they can offer a real, tangible benefit – either a longer-distance link that is not available on one stopping service or a very substantial improvement on a journey time (and preferably both).
ABOVE: A Metroline Volvo Evoseti, VMH 2566 (LA68 DXB), at The Grapes in Hayes, Middlesex, on Saturday 2nd April 2022. Note how the cycle lane runs through the middle of the bus stop, between the bus itself and the shelter.
The X68 has a five-mile non-stop section, so local passengers do not get in the way. But that’s a corridor that clearly has a lot of longer-distance passengers travelling, and it only runs in the peaks, “with-the-flow”. Could there be a bigger market for this one if it ran all day?
The X26 doesn’t have an obvious alternative stopping service (except on short sections), so people use it because it’s the bus that gets them to where they want to be, across South-West London.
It’s the kind of service that could be made attractive to car drivers heading into Croydon and Kingston, but it’s grossly under-provisioned, at a 30-minute frequency at best. The last trip I made on the route was almost at capacity, and it was noticeable how many people who boarded in Croydon went through to Kingston, a distance of about 12.5 miles.
One long-lost Express route that should have been successful was the 705, which ran from 2002 to 2005 between Paddington and Liverpool Street, stopping only at the various railway terminus stations on the south side of central London, plus Victoria Coach Station.
I used it a few times between Paddington and Victoria. There were never many passengers, not even on the peak 0740 departure from Paddington. The half-hourly frequency was unattractive. It also used to do a double-run via Victoria Coach Station before serving Victoria railway station. Some drivers would make an unofficial drop-off at Victoria railway station on the way down (making the journey time a very agreeable 17 minutes); others would go by the book and make everyone go via the Coach Station (journey time 27 minutes – longer than on route 36, which was much more frequent even when serving all stops). To be honest, building in a half-mile double-run on an Express service may have hastened its demise…
Chat forums have linked the Old Kent Road reference to an “X53” service, paralleling the trunk route 53 which now runs from Lambeth North to Plumstead, through Elephant, New Cross, Blackheath, Charlton and Woolwich.
This isn’t an original proposal. A 53X ran for four years from 1988 to 1992, but only an handful of ‘with-the-flow’ journeys, rather than what would presumably be an all-day, seven days a week service.
This is certainly a major corridor, but buses on route 53 only run every eight minutes, so an Express service would need to be in addition to the current service, and to have a unique selling point (USP). For example, could it go on from Woolwich onto the A2 and nip out to Bluewater?
Or could it go a little deeper into central London, such as to Trafalgar Square, Victoria or the City? Without a USP, it would just split the medium-frequency 53 into two less-attractive services. TfL has a track record of doing this, but that doesn’t mean it’s right.
To be honest, I’m not sure an X53 would be worth it, and I can’t think of any other London corridor that would benefit from an Express service either. It will be interesting what TfL comes up with.
ABOVE: Is this the route that will be split to provide the next Express bus service for London? Stagecoach E400 12285 (SN14 TXD) passes through Elephant & Castle, on route 53, in the evening rush hour on Friday 1st April 2022.