This post is about little-used buses on the eastern edge of Havering. If you've never ridden the 346, 347 or 497 it may not be for you.
These are the 20th, 7th and 14th least used bus routes in London, that's how irrelevant they are. The 347 is also London's least frequent bus (speciality routes excepted), and Geoff's just made a video about it.
A year ago TfL launched a consultation to tweak/combine/withdraw these three routes, with the 497 proposed to be the sole survivor. Yesterday they published the results of that consultation, and under the new plans the 497 is the only number to die.
I've made some maps because TfL don't do that for the results of consultations, only for proposals that may never happen.
The 346 is the oldest of the three routes and has been linking the outer extremities of Cranham to Upminster station since 1988. It runs every 15 minutes, which is quite generous, but is also one of London's shortest routes so operates with very few vehicles. It was going to be withdrawn and replaced by an extended 497 but that's not now happening and the 346 will be swallowing up the 497 instead.
The 347 is an infrequent single decker running just four times a day between Romford and Ockendon stations. You could also make that journey by train or aboard the 370 bus which is much more frequent and runs through places people actually live. The 347 by contrast takes the scenic lightly populated route, hence its two hour frequency, and most of those in the remoter cottages go everywhere by car anyway. The plan was to withdraw the 347 completely but instead it's being kept as is, for now.
The 497 is London's most useless bus, as many of us pointed out when it was introducedin 2020. The idea was to link Harold Hill to Crossrail at Harold Wood and to save residents of two housing estates from a slightly longer walk. But its roundabout route proved mostly superfluous, it's rubbish as a rail connector because it only runs every 30 minutes and launching just before Covid essentially strangled it at birth. Now TfL are finally binning it, just 50 months after it launched. Or are they...
What's really happening is that the 346 and 497 are being combined, with the connection along a remote part of route 347. The new 346 will serve everyone it serves now before continuing north from Upminster to Harold Wood and then serving the whole of current route 497. It'll also do this slightly less frequently, every 20 minutes rather than every 15. This is poor news for passengers in Cranham, but good news for anyone currently using half-hourly route 497 and bloody excellent news for residents of Shepherds Hill who'll go from 4 buses a day to over 50.
n.b. In the original proposal the hybrid route was numbered 497, but someone's obviously worked out it would be more politically astute to number it 346 because nobody will mourn the disappearance of the 497.
n.b. In the original proposal the hybrid route made a stupid detour round Cranham in the middle of the route rather than dashing straight from Harold Wood to Upminster. This was due to toilet issues because residents of Upminster Park didn't want a Turdis planted in their midst at the southern end of the route. But there's already a Turdis at the northern end of the route and bosses now reckon drivers can make do with that (and a bit of bladder control) so the stupid detour won't be happening.
n.b. In its brief four year history the unloved 497 has already been the subject of a somewhat desperate consultation asking 'should we scrap it or should we extend it?'. It was subsequently extended a mile to the driver's northern loo stop, not that this really helped boost passenger numbers, so now it's being nominally scrapped.
n.b. The extension of the 346 was first proposed in a pre-Crossrail review in 2016, but was discounted for having 'too many issues' in favour of a new route 497. And here we are eight years later.
"A decision has yet to be reached on the future of route 347. The route will continue to operate until further notice while it remains under review."
This could be good, perhaps rejigging or extending the route, but is more likely a prelude to withdrawing it later. In future the 347 will have only one unique stretch of route, just east of Upminster, and this might be sacrificed by making a few hundred people walk a bit further for a more frequent bus. The rest of the route will be mostly superfluous once the 346 extends. My hunch is that TfL want to publish the good news about the 346 before the Mayoral election and are holding back a decision on the 347 to avoid any negative headlines.
In the meantime the big changes to the 346 and the death of the 497 will be taking take place in two months' time, specifically on Saturday 9th March. The bad news is that's also my birthday so you can expect a blogpost about the 59 as well as the 346, and the week beforehand posts about new routes 439, 443, S2 and SL2, and the week beforehand a post about new route SL3. That's a heck of a lot of bus fuss just before Mayoral campaigning starts. Who says buses aren't a political issue?
