London's only independent bus operator threw in the towel on Friday, withdrawing their services from eleven routes in north London. Sullivan Buses have operated out of South Mimms since 1998 and will continue to run their Herts-based services as usual. But boss Dean Sullivan has had enough of TfL, and in a somewhat combative statement cited increased operating costs, delays in receiving payments and not winning any contracts recently for his decision to pull out of London completely. It's not all one-way traffic however, with alleged issues of reliability, compliance, vehicle maintenance and driver retention over a lengthy period. Whatever, for thousands of ordinary passengers trying to travel by bus in Barnet, Enfield, Haringey and Redbridge it's a right pain.
For the three school routes it's no big deal, given it's August. But for the other eight it's caused a manic scramble to fill the gap using alternative drivers and alternative vehicles from alternative operators, all cobbled together at the very last minute. I went out to see how much of a mess it was and also to see how well TfL managed to communicate what was going on, and it won't surprise you to hear it was a muddle-through all round.
217 Turnpike Lane - Waltham Cross (rescued by Arriva)
This used to be Sullivan's flagship TfL route, a radial anchor up the Great Cambridge Road, so is perhaps the biggest potential disruption. In good news the 217 is shadowed throughout by just two other routes, the 231 and 317, so on Saturday nobody was going to be left by the wayside. In bad news nobody had any idea when it was coming, because in common with all the ex-Sullivan routes it simply fell off the radar and vanished from the apps, just like travelling in London used to be 20 years ago.
When a 217 did turn up it had a blank blind, no destination and a route number printed on paper propped up in the window. You can't magic up the right information on an old bus's blind, certainly not overnight, (something Sullivan Buses were particularly poor at even on routes they'd run for years). Passengers were delighted to discover the Oyster reader wasn't working (often an issue with replacement vehicles), and were alerted to the good news by a scrawled "Not Working" message covering the pad. I have no idea how frequently these buses were running but the 217 ran successfully for me.
298 Arnos Grove - Potters Bar (rescued by Uno)
Many's the time I've waited for ages for a non-existent 298 in a lonely layby, indeed the route's unreliability has long been a hint that Sullivan's operations weren't optimal. But this one turned up roughly when the timetable said it should have done, again in a vehicle with the route number stuck to the windscreen. Admittedly the vehicle had 383 branding plastered all over the outside and '383 to New Barnet' along the side, that being the only TfL route Uno normally operates, but the 17 year-old single decker got everyone where they wanted to go.
299 Muswell Hill - Cockfosters (rescued by Go Ahead London)
Another free ride with a disconnected Oyster pad, hurrah. Again the route number was only visible thanks to printed A4 sheets and sticky tape, not in any way helped by both destinations being stuck to the window so it wasn't clear whether the bus was going to Muswell Hill or Cockfosters. At Southgate station I saw drivers walking round carrying their own printed 299 to stick in the window of whichever allocated vehicle turned up, and there was a sense of all this being done very much on the fly.
327 Waltham Cross - Elsinge Estate (rescued by Metroline)
I didn't risk going all the way to almost-Hertfordshire for this infrequent looper that might or might not have been running. "May be subject to journey cancellations" is bloody useless advice for potential travellers, it turns out.
389 Barnet - Western Way 399 Barnet - Hadley Wood
This duo are TfL's least used routes, and as such they were sacrificed on Saturday with no buses running. I suspect a number of elderly residents waited at the roadside for a non-existent hail & ride bus, oblivious to the muted news that services are due to resume on Monday.
549 South Woodford - Loughton (not yet rescued by Stagecoach)
The 549 is another little-used woefully-infrequent route, indeed it's due to vanish in six weeks' time and become part of route W14 instead. When I set out in the morning the latest information was "We are planning to run as many services as possible" and only when I got to South Woodford did I discover this was absolutely none at all. It's all very well being advised to use the TfL Go app to check for disruption, but a design flaw means routes only show up if they're geographically close so the NO SERVICE message popped up unhelpfully late.
W9 Southgate - Chase Farm Hospital (rescued by Stagecoach)
This single decker serves a lot of Enfield streets served by no other routes so its absence would be problematic, and indeed was. I waited at the Southgate terminus for over half an hour and nothing happened - no buses arrived, none departed and nobody seemed to know what was happening. I would have asked inside the station but it was closed for engineering works, and the pink-tabarded operative outside was only au fait with replacement buses. I ended up chatting to a would-be passenger who eventually gave up and caught a 121 halfway home instead. He didn't sound surprised when I told him Sullivan had pulled out at the last minute, telling me "I was talking to a driver and he said they just don't know how to run it."
The one bit of mitigation that seems to have been done properly was pinning up 'diversion' signs along the ex-Sullivan routes to tell unfamiliar drivers which way to go. They looked proper, practical and accurate, which is quite something given they must have been produced in less than 24 hours, suggesting at least one team at TfL is on the ball. Drivers may have been well informed but passengers certainly weren't, indeed I only discovered the W9 didn't start running until noon long after I'd departed. When crisis strikes it seems TfL don't have the communication skills to explain what's going on, with too few staff on the ground and an insufficiently responsive team elsewhere. Fingers crossed things have tightened up by tomorrow.
