If you've tried to catch a London bus this week, you may have been barred for being too old.
A substantial number of bus routes have seen the introduction of school-only services, starting on 1st September and continuing at least until the October half term. On low frequency routes this means extra vehicles have been added over and above the normal timetable. On high frequency routes it means alternate buses are designated School Services by means of a card in the window, and ordinary passengers have to wait for the buses inbetween. It's both a cunning way of getting quarter of a million children safely to school and a surefire way of leaving busloads of adults behind.
You can see a list of the routes affected here. It's a lot of routes.
• 131 bus routes are gaining extra vehicles, mostly in the suburbs. That's 25% of all the routes in the capital.
• 230 routes will be running alternately [school]/[not-school] between 0730 and 0930 in the morning. That's 40%!
• 104 routes will be running alternately [school]/[not-school] between 1430 and 1630 in the afternoon.
• Only about 80 routes aren't affected by these shenanigans at all, which is just 15% (or one route out of six).
Ideally children should be walking or cycling to school but that's not always safe or practical, especially when school is a number of miles from home. At least social distancing guidelines don't apply to school services so when a bus with a yellow card in the window turns up hopefully every child will be able to pile on. But for older users, already attempting to use a network with significantly reduced capacity, effectively removing half the services for two hours in the heart of the morning peak risks making travelling by bus very hit and miss.
For example, consider Bus Stop M in Bow. Five of its six routes are affected, and the only one that isn't (the 488) only runs for one more stop anyway. Essentially if you turn up at any time between 7.30am and 9.30am on a schoolday there's only a 50% chance you'll be allowed to board the next bus. It'd be helpful if the Countdown display distinguished between the two types, but either nobody's thought of doing that or the electronics prohibit it.
» The number 8 which turned up at 7.45am yesterday was a school service so lingered briefly beside the waiting passengers, noted that none of them were children and drove on. The non-children were not pleased.
» The number 425 which turned up at 8.30am was not a school service, nor was it especially full, unlike the 25 which followed.
» The number 276 which turned up at 8.30am was a school service, and empty, there being few pupils in Tower Hamlets who go to school over the border in Newham.
» The number 323 which drove past at 8.30am wasn't stopping, it was an extra vehicle shipped in from Bedford with an electronic display reading 'Bus Full - Social Distancing'.
» The number 25 which turned up at 11am was a school service, or at least it was according to the card in the window which I suspect the driver had left on display by mistake, it being an hour and a half after the official deadline had passed.
Juggling cards in windows has not been a spectacular triumph over the last couple of months, so I fear a lot of mislabelled buses will be annoying adults and schoolchildren alike in future... but not as many as the correctly labelled buses will be. Half as many buses that can themselves only be half full is not the optimum way to move London's population around, but should be a safe way of moving those who still want to be moved, whether that be to school or (alternately) not to school.
