TfL run all their services to timetable, but increasingly hide these from the public on the assumption we don't need to know.
Bus timetables were some of the first to go under the radar, no longer attempting to list departure and arrival times at main stops along the route. As TfL customer information development manager Mike King said in 2002...
Departure times are now only shown for low frequency routes (those running every 15 minutes or more), while arrival times have been replaced in their entirety by a single strip showing 'off peak journey time in minutes'.
In effect timetables have been replaced by two pieces of information - when is the next bus coming and how long does it usually take to reach my destination. In practice most passengers are only interested in the former.
And 'time to destination' is a very woolly beast, varying with time of day and traffic conditions. For example a journey which can take 18 minutes in the middle of the day might take 35 minutes in the evening peak or 12 minutes late at night. Old style timetables used to take this into account, providing realistic expectations for passengers because they were based on actual schedules used by drivers. But providing a single catch-all time can be highly unrealistic, often hugely misleading, indeed my hunch is that a lot of these journey times are wildly optimistic even in normal conditions.
I've had my doubts about 'off peak journey time in minutes' for many years, but nothing quite clarified it like these two timetables pinned up at bus stop BP outside Waltham Forest Town Hall.
One is for route 123, a longstanding service which runs from here to Ilford and supposedly gets there in 18 minutes.
The other is for the SL2, a new Superloop service which follows EXACTLY THE SAME ROUTE and supposedly gets there in 25 minutes.
There is no way that the all-stopping 123 gets to Ilford station quicker than the express SL2, especially not 7 minutes quicker. At least one of these sets of figures is absolute bolx.
I tested this out by taking an off-peak ride on the SL2 to see how long it really took. In the interests of accuracy I should say I've done this twice and got pretty much the same result both times, which I know isn't exactly proof but it does suggest my data's not wildly inaccurate.
Here's a table of my results.
According to timetable at bus stop
Stop
123 timetable
SL2 timetable
SL2 journey
WF Town Hall
0 mins
0 mins
0 mins
Wood Street
1 mins
2 mins
2 mins
High Road
6 mins
9 mins
8 mins
Gants Hill
12 mins
19 mins
16 mins
Ilford station
18 mins
25 mins
21 mins
» The 123 timetable had already failed by the time we reached Wood Street (formerly Wood Street library), three stops from the start. This is a distance of half a mile which I dont believe is possible in one minute (indeed it'd suggest an average speed of 30mph).
» By High Road my SL2 had been held up by a few lights, one temporary, but was still a tad early according to the timetable. For the 123 to get here in six minutes would require 100% perfect luck with traffic lights and no passengers wanting to board or alight.
» We sped along to Gants Hill, the traffic perfectly smooth for midday on a weekday, but allegedly the 123 can get here 4 minutes faster. I think not.
» And Ilford station took the SL2 21 minutes, again faster than timetabled but still implausibly slower than the 123's 18 minutes.
TfL also provide bus timetables online, impractical drilldown webpages which require a lot of clicking to find the times you want. These too provide a list of departure times and 'off-peak journey times in minutes'. And what's intriguing is that they show completely different journey times for both routes.
This time the 123 is timetabled to take rather longer, which is closer to reality. But yet again the all-stopper 123 is scheduled to pass along the route quicker than the express SL2, in this case by about a minute, and again I call out this timetable data as implausible ill-thought-through bolx.
But if you look elsewhere, specifically Robert Munster's excellent website londonbusroutes.net, it's possible to view the proper scheduled timetable for every TfL bus route. I've used this to find the actual timings for the SL2 journey I rode and its shadow 123.
Here at last the express SL2 gets there quicker than the slower 123. But not by much, not by very much at all, indeed only two minutes quicker on a five mile journey from Walthamstow to Ilford. What on earth is the point of running a Superloop service, you might wonder, if it's only going to speed you across London two minutes faster than a normal bus. Thankfully my driver made no attempt to 'regulate the service' by pulling over and lingering annoyingly at a bus stop, preferring to plough on ahead of schedule and get us to our destinations quicker.
In summary, the bolxest timetable of them all is the 123's timetable at the bus stop. This is so far from reality that I suspect it's a cut and paste error, or based on a stupidly inaccurate model, or numbers picked at random by an idiot on work experience. It's also ridiculous that two out of three timetable formats have the Superloop trailing the ordinary bus, and in the third case beating it only marginally. There's no coherence here, which is so often the way when it comes to TfL and the presentation of customer-facing information.
In a built-up city like London bus timetables can only ever be best fit, which is why the savvy traveller is on their app to check arrival times rather than scrutinising panels at bus stops. But rather than diminishing the role of timetables we should instead be trying to improve them, and not be presenting fictional timings that serve only to mislead.
