This is the timetable for the Silvertown Tunnel Cycle Shuttle bus, or SCS for short.
It runs every 12 minutes throughout the day, every day of the week. The first journey is at 0634 and the last at 2134. That's five buses an hour for 15 hours, or 76 journeys in total. And given the buses run in both directions, that's 152 crossings per day. I wonder how many bikes are using it.
We can see some data in a presentation given to the Silvertown Tunnel Implementation Group last month. They provided a graph showing daily shuttle usage across certain weeks last year. And as you can see, the number of bikes never once reached 152.
(It did exceed 152 in the first week the bus operated, with a maximum of 299 passengers on day 1, but in normal operation never that high again)
I therefore declare that the bus runs more often than the number of bikes who want to use it, which is insane. Put another way, the bus drivers are crossing the river more often than the cyclists.
It's very much the Mayor's prerogative to run a green-friendly bus to encourage cycling take-up, and still hugely cheaper than adding a cycle lane to the tunnel would have been. But the Silvertown Tunnel Cycle Shuttle Bus is an ABSOLUTE WASTE OF MONEY, regularly running empty for the benefit of a tiny number of Londoners, and there must be a better use for the £1,967,010 being squandered on it.
Friday's TfL press release, which limped very much below the media radar, was about improvements to the Mildmay line timetable.
It's unusual for an exhibition centre to fund extra train services, but that's because they're reopening fully after a lengthy transformation and want the publicity. Add more trains and people are more likely to come is the philosophy, which is especially true when you're opening 25 new bars and restaurants and want to be taken seriously as a prestige hospitality destination.
But it's not many trains, just three services in the morning peak and five in the evening peak. And they're only going five stops, not even as far as Willesden Junction.
Here's part of the new timetable, just published, jiggered about so you can hopefully see what's going on. (click to embiggen)
The extra shuttles have the green outline and start in May. All the other trains are in the existing timetable. The trains labelled 'SN' are hourly Southern trains running between East Croydon and Watford Junction.
The evening peak's current status quo is five Mildmay trains an hour plus one Southern train. The new shuttles will boost this by adding two trains an hour, cutting the gap between some trains from about 12 minutes to about six. That's very welcome extra capacity if you're used to cramming into a rush hour train. It does however come with a significant downside at Clapham Junction, which is that the extra trains run from a completely different platform.
Mildmay trains normally run from platform 1. But the extra trains are running from platform 17, which if you know Clapham Junction is way over on the other side of the station. Indeed platforms 1 and 17 are as far apart as you can get, accessed along a long squeezy subway or via a much longer footbridge. The smallprint in the press release thus reminds passengers "to allow up to 10 minutes to walk between platforms 1 and 17 at Clapham Junction", which pretty much wipes out all the benefits of running the extra trains.
Imagine turning up on platform 1, as normal, only to discover that the next train goes in six minutes from the other side of the station. You might reach platform 17 just in time for the doors to close, then have to trek back to platform 1 only for the doors to close there too. The switch doesn't really take 10 minutes but at rush hour you'd be hard pushed to do it quickly, so best not risk it, plus your average passenger won't even notice that the extra trains exist and will stay put anyway.
The extra trains are being funded by the consortium who acquired the Olympia complex in 2017 and will run for the next five years. But the three morning peak extras seem wasted because nobody wants to visit a luxury restaurant nexus at 8am, and the evening ones are a drop in the ocean running from an inconvenient platform. If they'd really wanted publicity then running a decent service on the District line to Kensington (Olympia) would have made a bigger splash, but operational difficulties alas make that a non-starter. It's clearly a lot better than nothing, but don't expect it'll genuinely help you reach 'London's newest entertainment destination'.
I was outside Alperton station in the week hoping to catch a bus to Wembley Central. How long will that take, I thought. So I checked.
According to the timetable the 297 gets there in 4 minutes, the 83 gets there in 6 minutes and the 483 gets there in 10 minutes. But all three buses follow exactly the same route stopping in exactly the same places, so the disparity is ridiculous.
I know these times are best guesses, and were originally described alongside as "off peak journey time in minutes". I know that different routes may have different loadings so it's possible there might be some variety here. But it is utterly ridiculous to suggest that one route should take more than twice as long as another, in this case a 6 minute difference, all on timetables freshly posted in the last six months.
And this is no unique occurrence, I've seen this kind of discrepancy across London. It seems there's no consistency in the production of these timestrips, no underlying model, just a bunch of backroom gibbons churning out numbers that sort-of look right. Obviously travel times will vary according to traffic conditions, but there's no excuse for giving three wildly different estimates for an identical journey.
(it took 6 minutes, by the way, in fairly decent conditions, so '4 minutes' looks ridiculously optimistic unless it's late at night and '10 minutes' is proper pessimistic assuming jammy cloggage)
