TfL's Public Transport Service Planning team is charged with keeping the bus network under review and occasionally releases development papers focused on particular geographical areas. A recent set covers the Lower Lea Valley, an area of "historically relatively low trip-generating industrial land progressively transforming into higher trip-generating residential land uses". When it was mostly river and industry it didn't need many buses. Now it's becoming densely-packed flats it probably needs more. [25 page pdf]
This map shows the southern end of the study area between Stratford and the Thames. The report asserts that completed units (green) are broadly located within close proximity of the existing transport network, but planned/under construction units (red/orange) are larger and often "in more remote locations with limited access or on the edge of 400 metres from existing network". 400m is TfL's magic distance in bus network planning, their target being that fewer than 5% of Londoners live more than 400m from a bus route. The developers of these estates will also have paid 'S106 contributions' for bus enhancement, a financial sweetener which helps grease the wheels of any improved bus services.
This newbuild site pokes south from Stratford High Street near the Bow roundabout and will eventually contain 1200 new homes. It's been growing for over five years and is substantially complete along the main road and the Three Mills River, but the majority of the site remains a building site or is entirely vacant, thus full-on bus demand remains a long way off. The complication here is that the development is surrounded on three sides by rivers and the only road bridge at the southern end goes to Three Mills Studios and no further. Thus the best the bus planners can currently do is extend a local bus route to terminate within the development, and they've pencilled in the 205 for consideration. On the plus side it'd only be three stops further, but on the negative side the route is already deemed to be on the long side and this might tip it into unreliability.
But developers anticipated this issue a long time ago so included plans for a new bridge to be built across the River Lea close to my local Tesco, allowing a potential bus route in and out. They even ensured the new flats on the far side had an access road alongside, this at least eight years ago, but as yet Culvert Drive ends abruptly at a temporary playground and no attempt has been made to bridge the gap.
If it's ever built, the bus planners reason, three other possibilities come into play. The 205 could be extended one stop further to what's now Tesco, connection made. Alternatively the 488 could be diverted at the very end of its route to deviate down Sugar House Lane before crossing the bridge to Tesco. Or the D8 could be diverted down Sugar House Lane, completely skipping its twiddle round the Bow Roundabout and Bromley High Street, potentially making the route a lot more efficient. Of the three the D8 option is probably the best, although I say that through gritted teeth because it'd mean taking it away from where I live.
But there are huge infrastructural problems. The first is that for the new bridge to be usefully connected to the A12 my local Tesco and its environs need to be completely redeveloped allowing for a new more efficient road network. This has been on the cards since 2011, indeed TfL once chipped in with plans for a full-on intervention which would have introduced a signalised junction on the Blackwall Tunnel Approach Road. But that consultation never reached a successful outcome, funding essentially dried up and now looks to have been kicked even further into the future than before.
I checked the latest version of the LLDC Infrastructure Delivery Plan Project List dated May 2024, the relevant row of the spreadsheet being number 70, "Sustainable transport improvements at Bromley-by-Bow, including but not limited to new
junction for buses and improved pedestrian and cycle links across the A12 (to include a pedestrian surface crossing)". Apparently it's only 25% funded, the redevelopment of Tesco has no planning permission and the phasing of the project has just slipped from Medium- to Long-term. Essentially it isn't going to happen before Sugar House Lane is complete, and maybe not even after that.
The second issue is that the bus planners repeatedly mention that their changes will bring a "new connection to local supermarket". Not so. The redeveloped Tesco is going to be a lot smaller than the current superstore - in the last set of plans less than a quarter of the size - and a Tesco Express would no longer be a true retail destination so why send buses there? I live in fear of developers bulldozing the existing store and rationalising its car park in favour of stacky flats because it'll wreck my local shopping options, but I remain optimistic it'll never happen because in the last 13 years it never has.
I also take issue with the bus planners saying the southern tip of Sugar House Lane is "more than 400m from the bus network" because measured in a straight line it definitely isn't. Even if you take rivers into account it isn't more than 420m from buses on Stratford High Street, and quite frankly people who choose to move to the tip of a peninsula ought to be able to cope with that. The simplest solution to the whole SHL situation, in the absence of a non-existent bridge, is not to bother sending any buses there at all.
Area 2: Leven Road development & Aberfeldy Re-development
This is bigger but simpler. What's coming, according to the bus plan, is 2800 units at Leven Road, 1200 units at Aberfeldy Estate and 500 units at Poplar Bus Depot, a total of 4500 new homes. The biggest site is on the former Poplar Gasworks, a squarish plot nudged into a bend in Bow Creek which has recently started absolutely shooting up. The first 9- and 10-storey gabled blocks now have residents, more are under construction further back and a Sainsburys Local has opened underneath (a facility the residents of the original Aberfeldy Estate were never deemed worthy of). It's all happening shockingly fast.
Poplar Riversiders already have the runty 309 to ferry them quickly east to Canning Town, or more slowly to the west, but northbound connections have always been poor. The plan is thus to extend the 488 from Bromley-by-Bow to a stand alongside the development in Leven Road, bringing swift connections to the District Line too. A longer route would require more vehicles and more drivers but the developers have already paid an S106 contribution for exactly this to happen so I expect it will.
By 'West Ham' they mean the massivedevelopment site on the western side of the station, again a former gasworks where remediation costs are now outweighed by property prices. It's been named Twelvetrees Park in an act of greenwash branding and will one day contain 3800 homes making it the largest site on the bus planners' list. Again it's shooting up rapidly but only on one side, nobody's moved in yet and the vast majority of the site remains blank. But two sturdy footbridges are now in place to connect to Manor Road and a brand new station entrance is under construction, which does beg the question of why you'd want to catch an infrequent bus rather than walking over to West Ham and catching a fantastic selection of trains.
The bus planners have no intention of sending the existing 276 or 323 buses into the estate because that would "result in a network hole elsewhere". So they've looked around and spotted the 488 again and suggested it could be extended via Twelvetrees Crescent to enter round the back, terminating at a new bus stand near the station. But you can't send the 488 to Leven Road and also send it here, plus what use is a connection to Bromley-by-Bow anyway? Another option would be to extend the 300 north from Canning Town, zigzagging in along the side of the bus garage, but why would you take a bus from Canning Town when you can already do that by train?
A third option is the creation of a Crows Road bus-only connection, this currently an insignificant service road beside the railway which would connect to an insignificant industrial dead end. As a positive this would also pass the 2100 homes proposed at Bromley-by-Bow Gasworks, a contaminated cluster of gasholders due to evolve into controversially cylindrical towers that got the nod from Newham Council just last month. But nobody needs a bus through this riverside wasteland for many years to come, indeed the whole link road plan screams 'aspirational nice-to-have', and we've likely now reached the bus planners' fantasy event horizon.
The options document ends with a proposal to extend the 241 through as yet under-developed corners of the Olympic Park, something which was launched as a real-life consultation in May so doesn't need to be here because it's already happening. Whether the 205 to Sugar House Lane, the 488 to Leven Road or the 300 to Twelvetrees Park ever follow on remains to be seen, but I wouldn't hold your breath.
