Over the weekend TfL withdrew bus route 549, extended route W13 and substantially restructured routes W12 and W14. I wrote about the changes last week, and how TfL's information strategy relied substantially on a very complicated map. I went back yesterday to see how the implementation had gone, and it turned out it had gone bafflingly.
In good news the buses were going to the right places and all the tiles had been successfully changed. That's not always a given. In bad news the apps hadn't picked up the changes yet, there were no timetables anywhere and the very complicated map wasn't really helping. Unsurprisingly passengers were somewhat confused.
I caught the W12 from Woodford Bridge ("hang on, where's the W14 gone?"). I caught the W13 from Leyton Mills ("hang on, where's the W14 gone?"). But my most illustrative ride was when I attempted to catch the new W14 from Snaresbrook Road, so let me run you through that.
The W12 used to go this way, ran every 30 minutes and turned left at the end of the road. The W14 by contrast runs every 60 minutes and turns right. And the problem with an hourly bus that has no timetables is you have absolutely no idea when it's going to turn up. Normally I'd check the timetable at the bus stop but there wasn't one. Normally I'd then turn to an app but the underlying data hasn't been updated so that was no use. Normally I'd then turn to an online timetable but TfL's webpage hasn't been updated and the message "The stop you selected has now been removed from the route and therefore we cannot show you a timetable. The route page will be updated shortly to reflect these changes" was of no help. Normally I'd then turn to Robert Munster's excellent but unofficial londonbusroutes.net, but even that doesn't have a W14 timetable yet so I was stumped. The next W14 could be along in 1 minute or in 59 minutes and I had no idea which. My saviour came from an unlikely source.
A lady at the neighbouring care home opened the window to the day room and called over "you've just missed one". I think she was happy to have an audience to assist. "They changed it. It's only running every hour now. The next one's at quarter past." She told me all this twice. It turns out that when nobody's bothered to sort any timetables, what you really need is an old lady with time on her hands and a roadside sofa. I came back again at quarter past and she was bang on.
At the first stop in Wanstead High Street a middle-aged lady saw we were a W14 so boarded without thinking and sat absorbed in her smartphone. She didn't notice when we unexpectedly turned left down Nightingale Lane, something the W12 used to do, nor spot anything amiss as we weaved round tightly parked backstreets. Only when we reached South Woodford station ten minutes later did she suddenly twig the W14 had gone "the wrong way". She asked the driver whether he was going to Leytonstone and he shook his head, it being hard to have a conversation through glass, and she alighted somewhat disconsolate. I don't know if she spotted that either the W12 or the W13 would now take her there, but she didn't bother consulting the very complicated map before she left so perhaps she took the tube instead.
On my other bus journeys much of the chatter on board was about where the bus was going, or more often where it wasn't. Even folk with apps or Google on their phones, who aren't used to being confused, were very confused indeed due to the lack of up-to-date data. Are we going to Leyton, one woman asked the driver, and had to ask again because she thought he'd thought she said Leytonstone. It has to be said that having multiple buses heading to multiple places called Woodford Something, and also Leyton, Leytonstone and Loughton, doesn't make for simple exposition. As for the very complicated map, half its coloured lines were now obsolete and irrelevant because what would have been terribly useful wasn't a 'before and after', just an after. But the biggest issue was probably the lack of timetables, both online and at bus stops, making it ridiculously difficult to work out what was going where when.
It may be that TfL's ongoing cyberattack has caused some of these problems, in which case passengers across Redbridge and Waltham Forest are presently suffering in a somewhat unexpected way. Or it may just be an example of piss poor preparation and an institutional expectation that people should be able to work it all out, which it turns out they very much can't.
