Roadworks are supposed to have started at the Bow Roundabout but they haven't yet, indeed it's possible they've actually been put back by two weeks. This is somewhat peeving given substantial bus mitigation has already taken place - five routes have had their frequency temporarily reduced and route 8 is now starting and finishing over half a mile away.
In good news there is now a poster saying that route 8 won't be stopping at Bow Church until 5am on a very specific Wednesday in 2025. In bad news the poster has been plonked outside Bow Church station, which isn't somewhere route 8 actually stops, indeed it's over 300m away. There is as yet no poster of any kind at Bus Stop M, only a continuing number of baffled passengers wasting their time waiting for buses that are never coming. If only they'd thought to walk here via the DLR they might have realised, and maybe over the next four months many of them will, but for now the only information provided is in the wrong place so not really helping. Theory: Whoever designed the poster thinks that route 8 stops at Bow Church DLR but it doesn't, and for that matter neither do alternative routes 276 and 488. All three stop at Bow Church instead.
We do have some new roadworks though, necessitating an annoying temporary set of traffic lights installed halfway between Bus Stop M and the Bow Roundabout. A gas company is digging up Payne Road which has entirely cut off the usual access to the McDonalds drivethrough, so cars now have to drive in from the Bow Road end which has been made temporarily two-way. The lights are 3-way to allow traffic from some flats to escape as well as from the restaurant, but generally absolutely nothing's coming out so traffic's queueing unnecessarily on Bow Road, and all squeezed into a single lane. Drivers aiming for McDonalds are generally baffled, and may or may not deduce that the diversion route involves a big loop via Old Ford. Thankfully it's only for a week. The real disruption has yet to begin.
