Last summer TfL launched a doomsday consultation proposing the withdrawal of 16 central London bus routes and the amendment of 43 more. At best it was an honest response to potential cuts in government funding, at worst it was a massive scare tactic designed raise as many hackles as possible. Then in November, after future financial issues were settled, TfL backtracked enormously. Only three routes would be withdrawn and only nine tweaked, perhaps significantly, so most passengers would be able to continue their existing journeys untroubled. Those changes are now to be implemented at the end of this month.
I therefore intend to ride (and blog about) the three doomed routes in the time allotted before their demise. Don't worry, I'll only do one a week so as not to overwhelm you with morose bus content. But I'll start instead this week with the route facing the largest curtailment, historic route 11, which for the best part of a century has linked Liverpool Street to Fulham Broadway. It's currently well known as the best TfL bus for ticking off top tourist attractions, but will no longer perform this function after 29th April when its eastern end is cut back from Liverpool Street to Waterloo.
Let's go sightseeing one last time.
Best bring a packed lunch.
Route 11: Liverpool Street to Fulham Broadway Location: London inner, west Length of bus journey: 7 miles, 95 minutes
The 11's epic trek starts one stop north of Liverpool Street station, which is good because it enables me to grab the top deck front seat before the school holiday crowds pile on. It's also bad because those crowds include two excitable pigtailed girls who rush up to the adjacent seat and proceed to bubble over. Their mums are forced to take the less prestigious seat behind me but that doesn't seem to matter because all they want to do is natter, at least once they've taken a photo of their grinning offspring screaming "Cheesy cat!" Such are the perils of the £1.75 tourist bus.
Ten years ago 14 different bus routes linked the City of London to the borough of Westminster. Currently it's only 8 and from the end of the month it'll only be 7 (including the distant 205 and the pointlessly circuitous 46). Connections lost during TfL's recent assault on central London include the 4, 8, 23, 25, 172 and RV1, and at the end of the month the 11 and the 521 join the funeral pyre.
The Gherkin is arguably the first tourist sight en route, although you don't need to get on the bus to see that, and the second is the Bank of England. Only westbound buses follow Threadneedle Street because half of it is now a cycle lane, marooning two dead bus stops behind a row of posts. The current roadworks at Bank involve a substantial labyrinth of plastic barriers in preparation for the permanent displacement of cars. They also mean we have to divert up Cheapside, what with Queen Victoria Street being long-term out-of-bounds, and this is already making my final journey longer than it needs to be.
At present two bus routes run parallel between Liverpool Street and Aldwych, the 11 and the 26. After the 11 withdraws the intention is that passengers will simply board the 26 instead, although TfL are simultaneously reducing its frequency from every 7-8 minutes to every 10. For the next few weeks 13 buses an hour still cover this stretch but from next month it'll only be 6, because when you squeeze 'em, squeeze 'em hard.
St Paul's Cathedral is so iconic we spend three minutes passing round two sides of it. It does look magnificent from up here but my front seat companions haven't even noticed it, they're too busy singing all the verses of 'The wheels on the bus go round and round'. Their singing does not discourage another passenger from asking if she can take the last front seat next to me, because the tourist draw is strong on route 11. Ludgate Hill has the first temporary traffic lights on this journey, and alas very much not the last.
Buses used to pass Somerset House, one of London's most popular tourist sights, until the recent pedestrianisation of the Strand removed that direct route. Now we curve round Aldwych instead which is OK but another minute lost, and on a slowcoach route like the 11 every minute adds up. We've reached the edge of Theatreland so ooh look, there's Mamma Mia and the Lion King plus the edge of Covent Garden as tourist London draws closer. Thus far it's taken 25 minutes to drive two miles, i.e. 5 miles per hour, but sadly we're not going to keep that 'fast' pace up.
Route 26 currently bears off here to cross the Thames and terminate at Waterloo. In future it won't, it'll carry on along the 11's existing route to Victoria to make up for this end of the 11 being severed. Plenty of other buses run from here to Waterloo, that's TfL's rationale, with the existence of the Hopper fare allowing them carte blanche to split as many future journeys as they like.
Strand is where our bus journey seriously seizes up. In part that's because so many bus routes go this way but also because black cabs do too... the ten vehicles in front of us are taxi bus taxi bus bus taxi taxi taxi taxi bus. After five minutes we've not quite reached Bedford Street (thanks to a parked van), after ten minutes we're not yet at Charing Cross station (thanks to congestion ahead) and only after 15 minutes do we finally escape into Trafalgar Square. All my front seat companions disembark at this point, the better to see multiple local tourist attractions on foot rather than from a traffic jam.
Whitehall, by contrast, will only take us five minutes. In part this is because our driver sails merrily past a bus stop where a mum is frantically waving, leaving her, her kids and her pink suitcases adrift. I have three new front seat companions now, thankfully less vocal, and between us we enjoy spotting the Cenotaph, Downing Street and the approaching towers of the Palace of Westminster. We then swing past Westminster Abbey where the tourist throng is at its densest... and blimey they've already started constructing the bank of seating opposite the West Door ready for the Coronation!
TfL's original plan was to withdraw route 11 completely and send the 507 this way instead, or rather to create a hybrid mess between Waterloo and Fulham and give it a stupid number. Thankfully they have not done this.
Oh boy, Victoria Street is an absolute logjam and we are going nowhere fast. It doesn't help that we can't get into the bus lane because the truck in front of us is slightly too wide. The box junction at Buckingham Gate is hardest to cross, the queue on the far side allowing barely a trickle of vehicles through the lights each time. The only tourist attraction here is Westminster Cathedral, which isn't really something you travel around the world to see. By the time we finally reach Victoria station we've been on the go for over an hour - fifteen minutes of it on this one street - and the entire top deck complement of passengers has given up and gotten off.
My journey through the last three paragraphs - i.e. Strand, Whitehall and Victoria Street - has taken a nightmarish total of 40 minutes. Even in the timetable TfL allow 30 minutes because central London is generally pretty choked... and this is midday midweek, not peak hour traffic. Imagine how bolting this jammed-up stretch onto route 26 could decrease its reliability, which'll be something to mull over next time you're in Hackney wondering where your next bus is.
Something miraculous happens after Victoria Coach station, we speed up. That's a relief because so far our average running speed of 3½mph means it would almost have been quicker to walk. We overtake several open-topped tourist buses whose passengers have paid considerably more to sit in the same queues but with a running commentary. But at the far end of Pimlico Road the temporary traffic lights trap us again, for more than one lengthy cycle, and there's only so much TfL can do in terms of bus priority measures when the streets of our city require such regular lane-blocking roadworks.
Look, it's a number 11 going the other way but only as far as Victoria Coach Station. That's not even halfway along the route, such are the perils of trying to run a reliable bus service beset by regular congestion. In this case the touristy end has been sacrificed to provide a better service for local passengers in West London, and that's pretty much all the future 11 will be doing anyway.
The Kings Road should be a breeze but no, three more sets of temporary traffic lights will beset us, every single one initially on red. But the view from the top deck has probably improved - now stucco, scooters and sassy shopping, plus the quality of what people are wearing has risen sharply. Worlds End is a little lowlier - the clue's in the name - but does have a greater proportion of residents who might deign to catch a bus. That said we now have barely any passengers aboard whereas through central London we had loads, suggesting TfL might be axeing the wrong end of the route.
Back in November TfL confirmed they'd also be diverting route 211, which has been shadowing us since Parliament Square. They intend to send it to Battersea Power Station rather than Waterloo, because the 11's now going to Waterloo remember, but as yet no start date for that move has been announced. In other words don't think all this 11-related shenanigans is the end of the matter, there's still more severing and shuffling to go.
After travelling two miles along the Kings Road, something only the 11 and 22 do in full, we finally turn off towards our last stop at Fulham Town Hall. This part of town is not on the tourist trail and only three of us are left on board. I'm aghast to see that this seven mile route has taken an hour and 35 minutes out of my life, which is an average speed of just 4½mph. But I'm even more shocked when I check the timetable where I discover the scheduled time is actually 1 hour 30 minutes and we were somehow only five minutes late.
The 11 is a total tortoise so if they lop off one end maybe it's only for the best. But I know I won't be saying that next time I'm waiting somewhere along the discarded section and the next bus takes ages to arrive. Perhaps the real enemy here is London's traffic because it's not just the 11 that's going nowhere fast, and a slow crawl through central London attracts fewer and fewer passengers.
