Last Saturday a temporary bus route was introduced in North Cray while water main replacement works block the main road. It's the 592, it supports a few hundred people who'd otherwise be busless for three weeks and it's not been introduced very well.
Route 592: Sidcup Station to Mount Mascal Farm Location: southeast London, outer Length of journey: 3 miles, 15 minutes
Normally you'd catch the 492 from Sidcup from North Cray Road but no traffic can get down the narrow northern stretch while it's being dug up so TfL have devised the 592 instead. Other than providing two double deckers they haven't thrown much effort at it. There are no bus blinds, only sheets of paper stuck to the front window. There are no tiles at bus stops, only poorly worded yellow posters. There are no timetables, seemingly anywhere. There are no live updates on apps so you have to guess when it's coming. There's no mention on the normally obsessive Bus Changes webpage. And there are no maps because TfL hate maps, but you knew that already.
The lack of a map is a right pain - where does the bus go, and more particularly where can you catch it? There's more than one stop called Sidcup Station, not all of which are served by the 592, so with no tiles on bus stops it's a bit of a guessing game. The yellow posters contain 250 densely-packed words but none of them define the start point, display the route or state that the service runs every 30 minutes. Thankfully Citymapper was able to chip in with a scheduled departure time, but the traffic on Station Road was mostly stationary thanks to roadworks on The Green so that time proved essentially fictional. With a bit of patience I did get eventually get a ride, but I'm not sure I'd have appreciated the ambiguities had I been trying to get home.
The traffic eased as not many of us rode down through Foots Cray and turned left at Ruxley Corner. Ahead lay the mile-and-a-half the 592 exists to serve, half of it built-up and the remainder almost rural. At the first stop the driver waited for a minute while a woman panted slowly towards us, she precisely the 592's intended clientele, although it turned out later she actually wanted to go the other way. This is usually a busy dual carriageway but there was virtually no traffic because there was no exit at the far end so we fair sped along. Only one other genuine passenger made it to the roundabout, where the driver dutifully turned back and dropped us 200m in the opposite direction because rules say only proper bus stops count.
It took almost 15 minutes to walk through the closed-off part to the heart of Old Bexley village, thankfully past Thames Water operatives doing actual digging. Here I just missed a 492 heading north, now back on line of route, which because it too runs half hourly was a further misjudged loss. So whilst it's great the 592 exists its implementation has been sub-optimal to say the least, almost like peripheral Londoners don't matter, and if you are the TfL manager responsible for disseminating the relevant information perhaps stop obsessing with pernickety written instructions and try to get the basics right.
