If niche bus content is your thing, you probably wouldn't expect online clickbait portal MyLondon to satisfy your needs. Their normal news diet tends to be victims of non-local crime, what someone said on ITV this morning and over-optimisticinterpretations of long range weather forecasts.
One day Callum will undoubtedly be promoted and MyLondon will have a vacancy for niche bus content, so I just wanted to flag my credentials in advance and prove that I can compose a clickbait headline any subeditor would be proud of.
The secret rare bus with London's highest number that serves an Essex commuter town even less often from today
It may be called Transport for London but TfL isn't ashamed to send buses into the Home Counties to serve passengers there. One such escapee is the 549, a peculiar route that runs very infrequently between London and Essex, and whose timetabled gaps have suddenly widened by 15% this morning. Admittedly it's not actually a secret bus, because that would be economically ludicrous, but the average Londoner lives nowhere near Woodford and most people in Redbridge drive anyway so will definitely never have heard of it.
The 549 became a TfL bus route in 2003 and shadows the Central Line between South Woodford and Loughton, except on Sundays. For some residents on Chigwell Road and Hillside Avenue it's the only bus, although north of Roding Valley station the sole beneficiaries are the population of Essex. Admittedly the 549 doesn't actually have the highest number of any London bus route because the 607 express to Uxbridge is bigger, as are all of the school buses, as is the 733 Northern line replacement, as is the 969 mobility bus in Richmond, but if you ignore all the special routes no bog-standard TfL service can beat the 549, so that'll do.
The northern terminus is at Loughton station near the big Sainsbury's, where anyone with any sense is going to nip on the Underground rather than wait up to an hour and a half for a bus. A not insignificant portion of the route runs through Epping Forest where passengers are highly unlikely to board, and there aren't exactly a lot of houses between the railway and the river Roding anyway. Admittedly TfL does try to serve all corners of the capital so it's only fair that those on the outer edge get a regular service, but what on earth is Buckhurst Hill in Essex doing with four London bus routes anyway?
It originally ran every 30 minutes, back when two vehicles operated the route, but in 2005 lost one of those and dropped to an hourly service. Heavy traffic made the route increasingly unreliable so since 2012 it's run every 70 minutes, i.e. at hard-to-remember times, but that hasn't quite solved the problem. So as of today the gap between buses is being increased to 90 minutes, which means longer rests for drivers and fewer journeys for passengers. Admittedly 'every 90 minutes' isn't rare by provincial standards, but only three TfL buses run less frequently so for London it's now very poor.
When the 549 started it was operated by Arriva, then later by Docklands Minibuses, then by Go-Ahead London and most recently by Stagecoach. But as of this morning it has a brand new operator, namely Sullivan Buses, which means passengers can expect to see a completely different diesel-powered vehicle pounding the streets. They've won the new contract with a timetable that winds down before 8pm each evening, whereas before it ran just after, which is yet another degradation of the service. Admittedly Sullivan are a lovely company run by caring souls, but one has to question why they're operating a bus route more than 15 miles from their depot in South Mimms.
I caught the bus and it was very much not full, indeed a minibus could have sufficed. Also one man got on expecting us to be the 167, because the 549's so infrequent he wasn't aware of it, so he asked to be let off at the very next stop. Not for nothing is the 549 one of London's ten least used bus routes. It also serves London's least used tube station and achieves an average speed of 14mph, which are precisely the kind of nerdstats a news article like this requires. Admittedly there was one elderly passenger who rode two stops on the London side of the border for whom the 549 is plainly a lifeline, but some would argue TfL shouldn't be spending our taxes on people like her.
A check of the new timetable confirms that only one journey is scheduled to take more than 30 minutes, which is the 0845 weekday departure from Loughton. Most journeys take 20-something minutes and the fastest just 18, but the new timetable is still allowing 45 minutes before drivers have to turn round and go back. This means there's now only room for nine journeys a day whereas yesterday there were twelve, and this is solely to even out the gaps in the service. Admittedly passengers tend to prefer a regular timetable to something that returns every hour and a bit, but it seems TfL are now prioritising a memorable service over one that makes best use of resources.
So that's the secret rare bus with London's highest number that serves an Essex commuter town even less often from today. You'll never use it but thank you for clicking, and do come back next time we make niche bus content sound interesting.
