Sunday, March 30, 2025
One of the key drivers behind London’s bus network is that 95% of the population should live within 400m of a bus route. There are indeed very few residential holes, at least with any significant population, as I documented in a past post called “Where in London is furthest from a bus route?”. Now two significant developments are filling two of those holes, one potentially via a new consultation, the other extending yesterday into unbussed territory. Hurrah for the SL12 and 434.
The SL12 is the latest proposed Superloop route and will bring the Mayoral express to the borough of Havering for the first time. It's very much not loopy, merely attaching to the existing network at the Gants Hill roundabout before bearing off to Romford and swooshing down towards Rainham. The first half shadows route 66 along Eastern Avenue but stops less often, and the second creates a fast north-south link the borough sorely lacks. It's all good, just so long as nobody cuts the frequency of the existing 66 and makes life worse for the people of Redbridge. And best of all, or perhaps most remarkably, it helps fills the London's largest busless hole on the godforsaken Rainham Marshes.
If you've ever walked the final section of the London Loop you'll know how remote it gets, the only buildings on the last mile down to the Thames being a crescent of well-hidden factories. It's these workplaces on the Ferry Lane Industrial Estate the SL12 will serve, which having watched employees yomping down to the estuary would be very welcome. It's highly unlikely five buses an hour is really necessary, especially when it's not shift changeover, and it'd be a distinctly isolated place for drivers to find themselves late in the evening. That said it's been TfL's aspiration to send a bus down here ever since they published a 50 page 'Review of bus services in London Riverside East' in 2019, so this is perhaps the ideal solution. The SL12 is "all gain", to use the jargon (although if they don't add an additional stop at Rainham Tesco that would be lunacy, just saying).
Meanwhile south of Purley another peripheral gap has just been plugged. The heights of Kenley have never seen a bus service before, not because it's difficult to get a bus up there but because it's difficult to get it out again. In 2020 TfL proposed a solution by diverting new route 439 up to the top and weaving it round quiet suburban avenues to turn it round, taking one hill in and one hill out. They eventually decided to send the existing 434 up there instead, then discovered it was harder than they thought to get it round all the corners which delayed things by twelve months. The final solution has required the painting of yellow lines round several awkward bends on Wattendon Road, whose residents could never have imagined a red bus weaving between their parked cars when they bought their outlying bungalows. Now here it is.
But upper Kenley's wider residents may not realise this new bus service exists because there's nothing up here to alert them. The entire elevated section is Hail and Ride so not a single bus stop has been added, nor even one of those little poles they sometimes sneak into H&R sections. That means there's nowhere to stick a tile, a timetable or a poster suggesting residents might want to take a ride, these only being present at bus stops down in the valley where none of these people live. In particular there isn't a map anywhere, not even on the TfL website where they normally hide one, so I've made one here where nobody will see either. See how the 407 runs along one side of the railway, the 439 runs along the other and the 434 now dawdles invisibly around the heights. It'll be noticed and welcomed eventually, another hole filled.
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