TfL has said that more Superloop London bus routes could be introduced. The express services now circle the city after the launch of the scheme’s latest legs.
There is one more to come next year that is due to travel through the Silvertown Tunnel between Grove Park and Canary Wharf. But, officials will be keeping an eye on ridership and reliability and may decide passengers would be better served by more.
TfL’s Director of Public Transport Service Planning, Geoff Hobbs, told MyLondon: “We will be looking at how these buses are preforming. Both in terms of their reliability but also, obviously, their usage.”
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He added: “And then we’ll use the results of that to think hard about whether the existing Superloop routes are the best they possibly could be, whether there are improvements there, or whether there are new Superloop routes that we could introduce in due course, in the fullness of time.”
Asked if more routes would travel around or in and out of the city, Mr Hobbs said that officials would not want to ‘compete’ with railways, which are ‘largely radial’. Rather, bosses seek to ‘complement’ the Underground, Overground, Elizabeth line and National Rail services.
“In terms of speed, railways will always be faster than a bus. But there are lots of orbital, main orbital routes which we could try and improve journey times [on],” Mr Hobbs said, “and I have my eye on some of them in particular to see whether they might be something that we want to do in future.”
It’s ‘too early to tell’, however, which ones these would be, the TfL boss added. Officials will be examining the data and looking for more funding from the Government, Mr Hobbs said.
More changes like those in Croydon and Sutton
As regards changes to normal bus routes, the director suggested that other areas of the capital will be seeing ‘more dense’ local networks resembling changes recently made to services in Sutton and Croydon. On March 2, a new route – the 439 – was introduced.
This replaced part of another stretch of the network. Another new service, the S2, also started. Route 455, meanwhile, was withdrawn. These alterations, Mr Hobbs said, were ‘to get a denser bus network’.
Mr Hobbs said these changes ‘to get a denser bus network’, and that Orpington could see similar alterations as officials are looking to see if they can ‘improve around there’.
Walthamstow, Wanstead, Woodford and Whips Cross will also see an increase the volume of services with a view to making Whipscross Hospital ‘more readily accessible’ from Redbridge in the east. In addition, in North West London, buses in and around Brent Cross will be transformed as the area is developed.
Mr Hobbs said changes are ‘half done and still to do’, referring to the recent extension of the 316 and 389 to the newly opened Brent Cross West Thameslink station. He added: “There’s lots more routes to open when, or to be extended and diverted and re-routed, when the road network there is completed.
“It’s very much a work in progress. There’s a lot of cranes and a lot of mud. But, in a few years’ time, we’ll be running quite a different network in that area.”
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