London's next dead bus 549: Loughton to South Woodford Location: outer London/Essex Length of journey: 5 miles, 30 minutes
The 549, which dies tomorrow, is one of London's weirder bus routes. It was transferred to TfL control from Essex in 2003, hence the unusual opening digit. It has the highest number of any regular TfL service. Most of the route lies outside the Greater London boundary. It runs only every 90 minutes. It's one of a tiny handful of routes to be operated by a single vehicle. It's in the top ten of London's least used buses. It serves the least used tube station. It doesn't bother running after 8pm. Perhaps it's not entirely surprising it's being killed off.
The 549 sets off nine times a day from the forecourt of Loughton station. Its number doesn't look quite so odd when other bus stop tiles include the 16C, the 418B and the 542A, but that's deregulated Essex for you. The driver's probably had a nice rest before you board because the timetable has been stretched to allow 45 minutes for what's usually a 30 minute journey, i.e. there's a lot of padding, hence the rockbottom frequency. Don't expect a new vehicle, not least because the 549 was formerly run by Sullivan Buses and they threw in the towel six weeks ago so it's being operated by a stand-in company who don't need to try too hard. But it still has its loyal customers, especially those who like to nip up to M&S Food or the big Sainsbury's and can't use their OAP passes on the tube. The first stop is called Sainsbury's, just Sainsbury's, because they like their bus stop names literal out here in Essex.
On my farewell trip the bus was decently loaded, not just with the grey-haired, including what looked like a sleeping vagrant but turned out to be a bus company operative hitching a ride. We turned left at Tom, Dick and Harry's, the TOWIE-friendly brasserie, and headed deep into the unpopulated heart of Epping Forest. Further bus stops with prosaic names include Cricket Ground and The Green, so you wouldn't know you were now in Buckhurst Hill unless you were a regular (which everybody is). Two other TfL buses head this way from Loughton but only the 549 turns off to make the connection to the centre of the village down Palmerston Road. You'd like it here, if you could afford it. The bus does a cute little turn into the forecourt of the tube station, like it's still the 1950s, although it wouldn't have looped round an Indian restaurant in those days, nor would the bakery have offered a Sourdough Sunday.
The 549 now enters its chief raison d'être, serving a long thin stripe of housing sandwiched between the Central line and the river Roding. The first half is still in Essex, an estate of unexciting Forties houses that look like semis but are squished rather closer together. The most peculiar feature is a sequence of short lollipop-shaped cul-de-sacs, each named after a tree, which exist because the railway stops them being any lengthier. Passengers with shopping baskets alight intermittently, and board intermittently, all along this stretch. The last bus stop before the railway bridge is called Monkhams Inn, despite the pub alongside being called The Monkhams (a Greene King with a very "...and onion rings" vibe). This is the alighting point for Roding Valley, the aforementioned least used tube station with its little-used shopping parade, and on ducking beneath the railway bridge this London bus finally enters London.
It all looks much the same, another relentless suburban avenue with banjo closes to either side, but far more of them and each considerably shorter. The next three sets of bus stops are all that really justify the 549's cost to London's ratepayers, and would be even more useful if only a cut-through existed to allow hundreds of Londoners in the parallel street to use it. A speedy whizz brings the 549 to Woodford station, still just 15 minutes into the journey, and deeper into more ordinary swathes of Redbridge. Thankfully we don't need to use the four-lane railway bridge closed for the last year due to cracking concrete, that's the 275's problem, instead heading down to the banks of the Roding and the allure of the council tip. If the bus is going to lose time it generally starts losing it here on the approach to Charlie Brown's Roundabout, and all that then remains is a hopefully brief dog leg to draw up outside the tanning shop by South Woodford Station. The 549 stops doing all of this at close of play tomorrow.
But the route itself doesn't die, because what's happening is that TfL are renumbering it W14 instead. It'll also be extended to travel a few more miles to Whipps Cross, along sections of route that aren't currently served by the W14 either, because what's happening here is a supremely complicated alteration to four different routes in Redbridge and Waltham Forest. It still confuses me, and I wrote a post trying to simplify the whole situation last year, so I hate to think how the local bus-riding population is going to cope. Here's TfL's supposedly helpful map they've posted up at all affected bus stops, and see if you can make head or tail either.
They've done what they like to do these days which is to combine all the changes onto a single map, because this saves money. This includes all four existing routes and also all three resulting routes so you don't get a before and after, you get both. To add to the complexity existing sections have solid lines, withdrawn sections have dashed lines and new sections have tramlines, so you won't work out what you're looking at until you've unravelled the key. To complicate things further they've also used dotted lines for Hail & Ride sections, but red dots for new Hail & Ride, black dots for withdrawn Hail & Ride and embedded dots for unchanged Hail & Ride. Then for completeness they've decided to include a minor loop at Woodford Bridge, a one-way system in Leytonstone and an imminently-irrelevant deviation at Whipps Cross Hospital, while ignoring most of route 549 because it would extend off the edge of an A4 sheet. It is an utter masterclass of cartographic bafflement, and presumably someone at TfL Towers is very pleased with it.
There was a much simpler summary map in the consultation for these changes...
...and wow it would have been much more helpful if they'd used that for the implementation phase as well, people might actually have got their heads around it. Come Saturday what people really want to know is "where are the buses going now?", not "where don't they go any more?", information which becomes instantly redundant. It's particularly important here because the W12 and W14 have essentially been chopped into bits and recombined to create completely new routes bearing little relation to the old (as you can see in the before and after maps in the consultation). I think I explained it quite well last summer, if you're interested.
• The W14 will be technically withdrawn.
• The W13 will be extended to take over the W14's southern end between Leytonstone and Leyton ASDA.
• The W12 will no longer serve Walthamstow Village, instead skirting it to the north. Between Whipps Cross and Snaresbrook it'll no longer take the direct route, instead deviating south via Leytonstone and Wanstead. In Wanstead it'll also no longer serve Nightingale Lane, extending instead to Woodford Bridge to make up for the loss of the W14.
• The 549, renumbered W14, will be extended from South Woodford to Whipps Cross. First it'll head south via Nightingale Lane, picking up one lost section of the W12, then take the direct route from Snaresbrook to Whipps Cross picking up another.
There's more, which is that two of the buses are significantly changing their frequency. The W12 will now run every 15 minutes rather than every 30 minutes, which is great, whereas the W14 will now run only every hour rather than every 15 minutes. This is excellent if you're a former 549 passenger because its much better than every 90 minutes, plus you get a Sunday service, but terrible news if you live on one of the two former W12 sections being downgraded. To be fair TfL have posted the new frequencies at every affected bus stop, and also that bloody complicated map, but that's all you're getting. Some bespoke local advice would be nice, like telling folk at Leyton ASDA to board the W13 or folk at the Orchard Estate to cross the road or folk in Loughton that the W14 will do everything the 549 used to, but printing bespoke advice costs employee time so each stop gets the same overcomplicated summary instead.
In short, TfL don't generally do bus maps and when they do they do them badly. Good luck to everyone who's about to be baffled.
(and if you do want to ride a dead bus before Saturday, don't ride the 549 because technically that lives on, go ride the W12 through Walthamstow Village because that's really what's being killed off)
