2014 is The Year of the Bus and you can celebrate it here with The South London Bus Blog.
South London Bus Blog has an excellent team of bloggers on the blog and we also run a forum @ ltbb.boards.net .
A page with the latest service changes can be found here.
Find out all the latest rare workings from the past month, to be released soon.
Recently we saw Route 136 extended to Elephant and Castle to help relieve the 343, do you think the extension is useful? Did you guys also want to TL's open day and how was it? Find the two posts on our blog and enjoy reading it.
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| (C) All rights reserved by LondonBuses67 |
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| (C) All rights reserved by LondonBuses67 |
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| (C) All rights reserved by LondonBuses67 |
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| (C) All rights reserved by LondonBuses67 Hackney's best performing route is Route 38 which as you can see runs from Clapton Pond to Victoria Station has the highest peak vehicle requirement in London, requiring approximately seventy buses to accommodate it's frequency of every two minutes within a great distance of seven miles. To avoid bunching on route, Arriva London North subsidiary curtails every other bus on route to Hackney Central near Clapton (CT) garage which half house the route with Ash Grove (AE), this therefore decreases bunching of buses at both ends of the terminal. Looking back at the route's past it never used to be a frequent when it had the Mercedes Benz Citaro O530G articulated buses which allowed the route's peak vehicle requirement to be only forty seven buses. These articulated buses were introduced under Ken Livingstone (ex Labour Mayor of London) who pledged to increase the capacity of the buses but at the same time decreasing the boarding time as the buses had three doors all with Oyster Card readers. Unfortunately, Ken Livingstone lost power in 2008's mayoral election when he was defeated to Boris Johnson (also re-elected in 2012) where he said that Ken's buses were not suitable and unreliable for service in London as the buses were 18m long causing a utter mayhem in London's streets. Furthermore, Boris Johnson also said that these buses contribute to huge fare evasion in TFL which leads to the organisation losing millions of pounds as people treated the buses as "Free Buses" with homeless people seen boarding them. This spark a fiery political row over Boris and Ken as to how to sort out London's growing population to transport people across the capital from A to B. However things did not go get resolved as Boris started to get rid of the articulated buses within his first year in office at City Hall where the 507 and 521 gained 12m Mercedes Benz Citaro before the 38 gained new Wright Gemini 2 DL and Alexander Dennis Enviro 400 but the Alexander Dennis Enviro 400 was diverted to the 78 making it have a double deck conversion as the route suffered severe overcrowding back then under single deck operation. Instead to fill the gap Arriva ordered Wright Gemini 2 DL's to fill the gap making it's peak vehicle requirement the highest in London. In 2012, Boris Johnson launched his campaign to replace the Ken's buses with his own New Routemaster which was criticised by Darren Johnson (Green AM) who said that the buses were a vanity project and costed for too expensive wasting taxpayers money. Indeed, I personally agree that Darren Johnson was right on his point over the criticism Boris Johnson had as the buses were indeed expensive however things doesn't better for Boris Johnson as he's basically a hypocrite for trying to end fare evasion on Ken's bus when his own bus had Oyster Card readers causing a return for a huge damage done to TFL with them getting less money from fares to invest in the transport infrastructure. Furthermore, Boris Johnson fought back by pleading to have passenger assistants to help avoid fare evasion and help passengers but this to cost expensive for TFL and therefore the idea is now withdrawn with routes being operated in one person operation giving him much more criticism over the future of London's transport and more importantly avoiding fare evasion. In fact fare evasion does happen on the 507 and 521 as they have Oyster Card readers for their buses and this again rises the issue that is not resolved caused by the introduction of articulated and/or new routemaster buses. To conclude on the political row, this aim to end the fare evasion caused by Ken's buses had failed as they both simply failed to stop it and instead to pay for it Boris Johnson from 2008 raised the fares up every year above inflation to pay for it and now it's up approximately over 50% which is unbelievably disgusting and horrendous. As of my personal view on the New Routemaster (Borismaster) I think it's worth the cost for the criticism for how expensive the bus was but there is downsides to the bus. The New Routemaster impressingly has three doors, two staircase which also slows down the boarding time of the bus which is good but the buses don't have openable windows. This therefore causes a huge issue during the Summer with free water bottles handed out to passengers as the air cooling on the bus wasn't great if it didn't work but even so it's not enough making this a huge downside to the project in the first place. Another downside would be that the buses have no passenger assistants due to it being too expensive to pay to have them as well as the open platform being opened causing risk in deaths in the road. To conclude on the buses, I personally do like the buses but unfortunately there are many downsides to the bus which makes this bus not as worth as the normal conventional buses we have such as the Alexander Dennis Enviro 400 etc. To be honest, the conversion on the route was not as great as many were anticipating for but again most understand that even though the conversion wasn't great the route would still be Hackney's best performing route as well as one of the routes in London with the best high frequency service. Fleetlist LT172 LTZ 1172 LT173 LTZ 1173 LT174 LTZ 1174 LT175 LTZ 1175 LT176 LTZ 1176 - Currently out of service due to recent incident on N38. LT177 LTZ 1177 LT178 LTZ 1178 LT179 LTZ 1179 LT180 LTZ 1180 LT181 LTZ 1181 LT182 LTZ 1182 LT183 LTZ 1183 LT184 LTZ 1184 LT185 LTZ 1185 LT186 LTZ 1186 LT187 LTZ 1187 LT188 LTZ 1188 LT189 LTZ 1189 LT190 LTZ 1190 LT191 LTZ 1191 LT192 LTZ 1192 LT193 LTZ 1193 LT194 LTZ 1194 LT195 LTZ 1195 LT196 LTZ 1196 LT197 LTZ 1197 LT198 LTZ 1198 LT199 LTZ 1199 LT200 LTZ 1200 LT201 LTZ 1201 LT202 LTZ 1202 LT203 LTZ 1203 LT204 LTZ 1204 LT205 LTZ 1205 LT206 LTZ 1206 LT207 LTZ 1207 LT208 LTZ 1208 LT209 LTZ 1209 LT210 LTZ 1210 LT211 LTZ 1211 LT212 LTZ 1212 LT213 LTZ 1213 LT214 LTZ 1214 LT215 LTZ 1215 LT216 LTZ 1216 LT217 LTZ 1217 LT218 LTZ 1218 LT219 LTZ 1219 LT220 LTZ 1220 LT221 LTZ 1221 LT222 LTZ 1222 LT223 LTZ 1223 LT224 LTZ 1224 LT225 LTZ 1225 LT226 LTZ 1226 LT227 LTZ 1227 LT228 LTZ 1228 LT229 LTZ 1229 LT230 LTZ 1230 LT231 LTZ 1231 LT232 LTZ 1232 LT233 LTZ 1233 LT234 LTZ 1234 Thank you for reading this post and for visiting our blog, Remember to stay safe. |
