This is the latest advice for ex-347 passengers on the TfL website. It appeared yesterday now that the route has been extinguished.
It's on the tfl.gov.uk/modes/buses/bus-changes webpage which I'm convinced hardly any London bus passengers look at - it's not even a memorable URL. Yellow notices at affected bus stops only advise passengers to check their travel at tfl.gov.uk/buses, not tfl.gov.uk/modes/buses/bus-changes, so even if anyone does bother to check it's unlikely they'll notice the special advice halfway down another page.
When they say West Road they mean South Ockendon. The 370 is also the bus to take to get to North Ockendon. They've completely failed to mention North Ockendon.
God no. The 499 does go to the big Tesco, I grant you, but goes literally all round the houses and takes 40 minutes to get there. The 498 goes direct in 10 minutes, and admittedly stops round the back of Tesco on the main road so you'd face a five minute walk but no sane traveller would take the 499. Perhaps these instructions have been written for risk-averse passengers in wheelchairs.
The 269 is an existing non-London bus that deviates into London for just five stops. If you lived on Clay Tye Road you'd already know it existed and that it runs even less frequently than the infrequent 347 and goes somewhere entirely different. If TfL were feeling helpful they might have linked to further information about the 269 including a timetable or a map, because these exist, but they didn't.
This is TfL's favourite excuse when they scrap a route - it won't cost more because you can always catch more buses. But why the hell have they mentioned Trams? This is outer Havering, you cannot possibly get to a tram stop within the Hopper's hour-long limit.
This is much more complicated than it needs to be with an excess of peripheral routes. It's much too messy at the Romford end, where the infrequent 347 had so many alternative routes that nobody would have waited for it specially. It's not clear enough that the new 346 is an ideal replacement for the 347 along much of its route, as any regular passenger would already have noticed. It only shows a sliver of the 269, not where it actually goes. Also it says 'Tram' again.
What's wrong with a map?
Here's my unprofessional attempt.
If you're now going 'oh I see what's happening now', I think that proves my point.
See how the 346 has already essentially replaced the 347 between Harold Wood and Upminster. See how the 370 is an excellent alternative between Romford, Upminster, North Ockendon and South Ockendon. See how the 269 is not a great alternative for London residents. See the brief section of road east of Upminster that no longer has a bus service because the red 347 has been withdrawn. Yes my map's oversimplified and no it doesn't cover every possible need, but that's why it's more useful.
Don't be so patronising about crossing roads. And you can't jaywalk here anyway because there's a barrier in the middle of the road so you have to use the subway. Also stop QQ is not at Mercury Gardens. I wonder if whoever wrote this advice has ever been to Romford, let alone ridden the 347 bus.
This is something TfL are mysteriously fixated on when a bus route changes - explicit detail about how to walk from where the old bus stopped to where the new bus departs. Only in their world does anyone need to know that stop M is precisely 26m from stop K, for example. What'd be useful here is a simple map showing which routes leave from which bus stop. Instead someone has gone to the effort of creating an unhelpfully verbose map that focuses on instructions rather than clarity.
There are going to be four more of these maps, so maybe stick the kettle on.
This is the stupidest advice on the entire page. Stop QQ was the penultimate stop on the 347 so nobody ever boarded here, indeed it's only a 300m walk to the last stop at Romford station. What's more if someone were so incapacitated that they did need to catch a bus, they wouldn't have waited specially for a bus that runs only four times a day, not when the other buses run 400 times between them.
All of this is then repeated on a map - the locations, the walking distances, the routes and the destinations. It's very much overkill. They could just have linked to the Romford station bus spider map - it still exists and it's been specially updated. Instead an employee has sat down and created a walking map nobody needs.
My hunch is that all this is part of an equalities agenda, hence the presentation of information that would be appropriate if you were blind, seriously infirm or otherwise challenged. However I very much doubt that such a passenger exists, mainly for the reason that the 347 was one of London's least used services. The 347 used to get just 32600 passengers a year, that's 100 a day, or 13 per bus, and almost all of those were regulars. It would have been easier to ask the 347 driver if they ever had any blind or wheelchairbound passengers and then to get on the bus and offer them perfect advice face to face.
Again you'd have to be a pretty perverse passenger to have only ever used the two-hourly 347 to get to Romford and not to realise that other much more frequent options exist. There's a direct train with full step-free access, for example. Also whoever wrote this has ignored the fact that route 347 will also no longer serve stop B so you ought to catch the 346 instead, this because they've fixated on changing buses rather than catching them.
OK, now we're getting to the important stuff. TfL are ceasing all bus services to seven bus stops east of Upminster, indeed when I was there last week they'd already removed one of them. Screw you, people of East Upminster, they could have written.
The sanctimonious advice about taking care when crossing roads is grating now. People are only having to walk to distant bus stops because you withdrew their bus service for goodness sake. There is at least a pavement, it's not like the country lane nightmare when TfL withdrew the R7 from Maypole and Bopeep, but it's not a good look for a public service organisation.
Pike Lane's not on the map, neither is it the name of a bus stop, but I suspect locals would know where it was. They'd also know how to walk to the bus stop on Front Lane, they don't need an over-complex map, but TfL have drawn them one anyway. See how the cartographer has patiently depicted how to walk around a grass verge to reach the pavement in multiple locations.
God no. Residents of Franks Cottages (which is all of eight houses) don't want to walk to Clay Tye Road for a terribly infrequent service. The map shows it's a 700m trek for a southbound bus and, ridiculously, a 1200m trek for a northbound bus. Meanwhile it's 1400m to that stop on Front Lane where the 346 stops every 20 minutes.
And then the advice stops... whereas there are in fact three more stops on Clay Tye Road the 347 no longer serves. I counted 38 houses on Clay Tye Road when I walked the length of it, all occupied by London taxpayers, all of whom are having their London bus service withdrawn. And what they should do if they still want a bus is walk south along the pavement to North Ockendon and catch a 370 there. It's about 1000m distant and the 370 runs every 12 minutes so it's the obvious solution.
The other stop that's no longer got a TfL bus service is Ockendon station itself. The underlying vibe in this advice would be to catch the non-TfL 269 but it'd be much better to walk 500m to the parish church and catch the 370 there, then you could be in Upminster in minutes.
It seems ridiculous for TfL to have written such complex advice for an infrequent bus route hardly anyone used. As a guide to what 'hardly anyone' means, consider the passenger numbers at the affected bus stops east of Upminster. In a previous FOI response TfL published the number of boarders at every bus stop on a typical weekday and the 347's numbers were pitiful.
CHESTER AVENUE 0
WINCHESTER AVENUE 0
FRANKS COTTAGES 0
EAST VIEW KENNELS 0
CLAY TYE FARM 0
WHITE POST FARM 0
FEN LANE 0
HOME FARM COTTAGE 0
GROVE FARM COTTAGES 0
GROVE FARM 0
NELSON ROAD 0
WEST ROAD 0
TYSSEN PLACE 0
OCKENDON STATION 0
Nobody was catching the eastbound 347 from stops beyond the edge of Upminster, nobody at all. It's not quite so tumbleweed in the opposite direction but it nearly is, with an average of just two boarders daily along Clay Tye Road. These are ultimately the reasons the 347 was scrapped, and the main reason why all this detailed advice is so unnecessary.
If you're a member of the team at TfL who puts all this together my apologies. I've ripped apart your precise and conscientious work and you probably spent ages compiling it and checking you'd covered everything. My real target is the boss who decided this level of ridiculous detail was necessary, in particular that multiple options needed to be explicit and that walking distances to alternative stops should take prominence. Just look back at the idiocy you've presided over here, you blinkered jobsworth, because in ticking boxes you've failed to produce useful advice for the wider public.
All the average punter really wants to know is "OK so which bus do I need to catch now?", a question most easily answered from a map.
It's galling that TfL no longer produce proper bus maps, indeed it's nine years since they last bothered, and yet they can still churn out half a dozen stupid maps when a bus route is withdrawn. I take heart that none of the handful of passengers who used to ride the 347 will see them.
