I thought it would be interesting to work out which TfL bus route spends the most time outside London.
Sorry, you probably don't share my interest but I'm blogging about it anyway.
If you are interested that's great. But please don't tell me that my last sentence was incorrect because you are but one person and your individual interest does not invalidate its veracity. I considered my entire body of readers and (correctly) judged that a minority of them would be interested in a post about bus data, and for this reason my use of the word 'probably' is entirely justified.
Also I entirely underestimated how long it would take to calculate this data.
First I had to work out which TfL bus routes leave the capital, and thankfully that's easy because I've made a list before. Then I gulped because it turns out there are 60 of them and I needed to know three awkward pieces of information about each of them. I needed to know the length of each of the 60 routes with some degree of accuracy. I needed to know at which point each of these 60 routes crossed the Greater London boundary. And I needed to know what length of each route lay beyond the border, which is not a statistic even TfL has lying around. I set up a spreadsheet with three columns and shuddered at the scale of my statistical task.
So what I did was dig around on my hard drive and extract the results of multiple Freedom of Information requests released over the last five years. Specifically I found a spreadsheet listing how long all the variations of TfL's bus routes are, and also hundreds of pdfs that TfL use as service specifications when they put bus routes out to tender, most of which list route mileages and/or distances between bus stops. Annoyingly they're 'secured' pdfs so you can't cut and paste the individual distances, you have to add them up yourself so I might potentially have ballsed that up. Also not all the routes had specifications and not all the specifications had mileages and some of the routes have changed since the documentation was produced, so I also ended up doing a lot of measuring on Google Maps.
For all these reasons the mileages I'm about to present to you may be incorrect or at least approximate, for which I apologise in advance. It might be safest to consider all the mileages to the nearest mile, such is the potential margin of error, and perhaps to consider all my percentages as plus or minus 5% as well. Annoyingly these approximations call into question the order of the top two buses in my first table, although I'm pretty sure the top two in my second table are correct.
Also when I say 'the routes that spend the most time outside London' I actually mean distance, not time, because language is a sloppy thing.
Also I'm afraid the photos I've used to illustrate the two tables are out of date. One is almost ten years old which I know will annoy a hardcore minority of you, and the other is from last April so includes a seasonally inappropriate quantity of leaves. I've included these photos mainly for the benefit of people whose eyes glaze over when they see I've written about buses so will just look at today's photos, surf off elsewhere and get on with their lives.
With all those caveats, here are London's least Londony buses.
The TfL bus routes that run furthest outside London
The winner is the TfL bus that heads for the hills, specifically Box Hill, via Leatherhead and a lot of places in deep Surrey countryside. By rights TfL should turn round the 465 rafter Malden Rushett but Surrey county council pump in sufficient funding to send it all the way to Dorking. In second place is the 166 which spends a lot of its time just outside the Greater London boundary and even ducks back in (briefly) near the lavender fields. Note that only one in three 166s goes all the way to Epsom, the other two come to a halt in Banstead. Third place goes to another Surrey wanderer, the 216, but this time north of the Thames on its safari to Staines.
Next come three buses that exit London near Dartford and run fast to Bluewater, because there's money to be made transporting Londoners to the shops. Staines gets another look in with the 290 and then it's the 81 which for legacy reasons extends all thee way to Slough. The 20 is the only vaguely north London bus in the list, should you ever want to get to Debden the slow way, and the little K3 rounds off the top 10 with yet more Surrey meanderings. The only other bus routes to run for more than five miles outside the capital are the 405 to Redhill, the R5/R10 Knockholt circulars and the 467, of which more imminently...
The TfL buses with the greatest proportion of their route outside London
Somewhat ridiculously eleven TfL buses spend more time outside London than inside it, and these are they. Top of the list is the ludicrous 467, an hourly service shuttling round Chessington and Ewell which for inexplicable reasons operates with double deckers. An astonishing 70% of the 467's route is in Surrey, almost as if Surrey should be operating it instead. The 216 is second with two-thirds of its route outside London and then we're back to Epsom again, indeed there are four Epsom routes in this paradoxical list. The 428 is the only Bluewater route to appear because, in terms of proportions, Erith to Crayford is quite short. But much of this list is the same as the previous list shuffled into a different order.
Just below the Top 11, with percentages in the high 40s, we find routes 81, 167, 96, 405, 411, 293 and K3 (some of which might actually exceed 50% if my measurements were more accurate.
Meanwhile if you'd like to know the TfL bus route that only just nudges over the Greater London boundary that's easy, it's the R68. After its penultimate stop at Hampton Court Palace it crosses Hampton Court Bridge, passing into Surrey midway, then grinds to a halt after less than 200m outside Hampton Court station. In second place is the 150 on the other side of town which exits Hainault just after its penultimate stop, and draws up beside the green in Chigwell Row in what's fractionally Essex 250 metres later. Another five routes spend just half a mile in Hertfordshire on their way to Waltham Cross bus station, a distance which would be even shorter if they didn't have to spin round the bypass.
I'm not sure that juggling these potentially inaccurate statistics was the best use of my Friday evening, but if nothing else we've learned that TfL run several buses whose routes are mostly outside London and this is both unexpected and counterintuitive.
