TfL trials new bus shelter designs at 27 locations across London
TfL is running a 12-month trial on new bus shelter designs to improve accessibility, safety and customer experience
It said that improvements include "better lighting and seating, priority spaces, a more sustainable modular construction approach, a new roof design, more robust anti-vandalism materials and CCTV". It said the trial began at the end of January and will run for 12 months. And it said the 27 locations would span Barking & Dagenham, Bexley, Camden, Croydon, Hackney, Havering, Hillingdon, Kingston-upon-Thames, Lambeth, Southwark, Wandsworth and Westminster, but it didn't say where any of the shelters were.
Thankfully when they sent the press release to trusted partners they attached three photos, one of which showed a bus shelter in situ beside an existing bus stop. And thankfully when Time Out regurgitated the words they included a big version of the photo so I could zoom in on the name of the stop, and so I've been to have a look.
And it looks good.
This is a new shelter in place at bus stop SB opposite Southwark station. I should have guessed it'd be here because this is the closest bus stop to TfL HQ on Blackfriars Road and they like to do a lot of their prototyping here. It's a lot easier to check how the trial's going if you can simply pop out and look, rather than having to troop out to Sidcup or wherever.
The thing passengers are most likely to notice are the seats. Normally they're red ribbed plastic but here they're polished wood, which instantly adds a touch more class. At one end are two distinct seats - again an innovation - one of which says 'This is a priority seat'. You would of course hide the sign by sitting down, but hopefully your conscience would be pricked if anyone in genuine need turned up. Alongside is a thin bench which I can confirm slopes gently forwards, so even if you're a very short thin homeless sleeper you're still going to roll off.
The roof is swooshy and red all the way round, not just at the ends. This flash of red should make the bus shelter easier to identify from a distance. The ends are thicker still, ensuring they stand out more. And crucially they allow the name of the bus stop to be written in larger letters than before, also aiding accessibility. I walked down the road to a normal bus shelter in an attempt to compare the two end designs, hopefully standing the same distance away each time. It's definitely an improvement.
The lighting inside the shelter is considerably brighter than before. Normally you wouldn't be able to tell mid-morning but yesterday was so damp and gloomy that the lights had come on, adding a homely glow to the interior. It's probably LED-based, collectively glowing through a mesh of tiny circles inside a long glowing strip. Better illumination is clearly a boon at night, especially with the safety of vulnerable passengers in mind, but also makes it easier for drivers to see if anyone's waiting so is doupleplus good.
As for information this particular stop still has a Countdown display so TfL aren't backing away from those. Yes there are electronic adverts on both sides of the panel at the far end but that's the case with a normal shelter too, plus they help fund the installation of a shelter in the first place. Alas what nobody's yet got round to adding here is a spider map, despite other bus stops on Blackfriars Road having one, but it is totally par for the course for maps to be an afterthought.
The shelter looks more vandalproof without being clumsily robust. The supporting poles seem a tad thicker. An extra metal bar connects the poles just below the roof. The roundel-patterned glass is likely stronger than usual. And because the roof slopes a little more it should be harder to lob things up there permanently, although I don't mean that as a challenge.
Importantly not all the trial bus shelters will look exactly like this. According to the press release "two different designs and four different configurations of features will be used to test the new approach, ensuring a broad range of criteria can be assessed throughout". CCTV is mentioned and I couldn't see any cameras here, so maybe that's part of Design Number Two. Reference is also made to "a dedicated waiting space", presumably for wheelchairs and pushchairs to line up better with the middle doors, and maybe that's part of the alternative design too.
We have no clues as to the other 26 locations, other than names of boroughs, so tracking them down would be extremely difficult. I did however hit gold by spotting a truck with a crane just up the road on the other side of TfL HQ. A team of three men were busy dismantling the existing shelter at Stamford Street, two of them up portable scaffolding wielding power tools. They had the roof off and lying on the ground, the innards already on the back of the truck and were preparing to disconnect the Countdown display. I note that the double-sided ad panel remains in place throughout the replacemet process, only the rest of the shelter has to be switched.
Before you get carried away, the trial is a mere drop in the ocean and is unlikely to crop up on any of your journeys. There are 14,000 bus shelters across London and only 27 are being tweaked, which is less than 0.2% of the overall total. Also there are 19,000 bus stops, only three-quarters of which have bus shelters, which lowers the percentage still further to 0.14%. TfL recognise how low this is.
Alongside the trial of new shelter designs, additional bus shelters will be introduced at locations that previously had no provision. Approximately 20 new Landmark London shelters are being installed at some of the network's highest demand stops, many of which have not had a shelter before. 11 refurbished shelters are being redeployed across the network to further improve waiting conditions for customers at unsheltered stops.
You could read that as great news, or you could note that adding 31 bus shelters at unsheltered stops is a complete drop in the ocean, not even enough for one extra per borough.
Whatever, keep your eyes peeled and you might just spot a trial bus shelter somewhere, in which case do come back and tell us where it is. It wouldn't surprise me if researchers pop out over the forthcoming year and ask passengers at these stops what they think, joining feedback from disability focus groups, the RNIB, the Suzy Lamplugh Trust and London TravelWatch. And come 2027 or beyond we may start seeing more bus shelters that look like this, which would be nice, but only when they need replacing, repairing or if funding comes through to pay for new ones so don't get your hopes up prematurely.
