The phantom closure of Bus Stop M has ended, to the relief of many Bow residents.
It closed on Saturday for roadworks that never happened, reopened sequentially on Monday morning and was finally given the digital all-clear on Wednesday evening after a slew of impressively unhelpful messaging.
Friday evening
Bus Stop M is operating normally.
Saturday morning
Bus Stop M has been coned off and buses are not stopping. There are no 'Bus Stop Closed' signs but it's fairly apparent buses won't be stopping because of the cones. I speak to the police officer doing this morning's speed trap and he says he's spoken to the bus garage and drivers have been told not to stop. Locating a speed trap at the precise point where cones narrow Bow Road from two lanes to one seems a bit pointless, but I don't say that. I should have asked why Bus Stop M has suddenly become a favoured speed trap location over the last few weeks but I don't ask that either. There are no roadworks, just cones.
Saturday afternoon
Bus Stop M is still coned off but it does now have 'Bus Stop Closed' signs. It has a yellow sign on the flag, yellow posters on the panel and an electronic message on the Countdown display. None of the messages are as helpful as they could be.
Please use previous Bus Stop is all very well, except on route 8 because this is the first stop so there isn't a previous one. Also you have to know where these previous stops are, which has been made harder since 2020 when Bus Stop M's spider map was taken down and never replaced. Thankfully there's a poster to explain more.
Unfortunately it's a bad poster.
From: 6/20/2026
Until: Until further notice
Buses are not stopping here
This bus stop is closed due to Thames Water Works
Firstly the date's been written the American way, which is not normal TfL style. Secondly this says "Until: Until", suggesting it's been compiled slapdashly. Also 'Until further notice' sounds somewhat dramatic although it's really ignorance. I went online to the one.network site and within a minute confirmed that the Thames Water works were supposed to last five days from 23rd-26th June, so not actually starting on the Saturday at all, but whoever had produced the poster can't have been party to this information.
Customers should catch their bus:
Route 8, First stop in Parnell Road.
Routes 25, 425 and 488, at the previous stop on Bow Road.
Route 108, from Campbell Road.
Route 276 from Fairfield Road.
But route 8's new 'first stop in Parnell Road' is a 1km walk away, so hardly convenient. The easiest way to get there would be to cross the road and get the 276 or 488 from Stop J but that's not mentioned.
But route 488's previous stop is not on Bow Road, it's on Fairfield Road. Also the route terminates at the next stop, Bow Tesco, so you'd be much better off walking there (500m) than going back to Fairfield Road (400m) and waiting for a bus.
But route 108's previous stop is on Bow Road, not Campbell Road, so you don't need to walk the extra 130m.
Also routes N25 and N205 are not mentioned.
That's a bad poster in my book.
Sunday morning
There are still no roadworks. There is however a truck from Hatton Traffic, the company TfL have outsourced to close the road. They "deliver safe, compliant traffic management solutions" and have sent a man round to check the cones are still in the right place. They're not, a lot of them have got knocked since they were laid out yesterday, so the man nudges them all back into place. I'm quite impressed by this attention to detail.
However cyclists continue to ignore his hard work because the cones are bloody silly. The cones want cyclists to ride out into the main traffic which is now restricted to a single lane, protected only by a sign that says 'Narrow Lane - No Overtaking Cyclists'. However the bus stop bypass at Bus Stop M is plainly empty and there are no roadworks, so every approaching cyclist weaves through the cones and uses the normal cycle lane instead. The lack of joined-up thinking here is endangering cyclists unnecessarily, or would be if cyclists were stupid enough to believe the unnecessary cones. The man from Hatton Traffic drives off, his ticklist complete.
Monday morning
There are still no roadworks. There are also no cones because the man from Hatton Traffic has been round and removed them all. It seems the Thames Water works have been cancelled, postponed or perhaps never existed. Buses are now stopping as normal and it's almost like the two-day weekend fever dream never happened. However it lingers on.
This morning's second visitor has arrived in a white van from TfL's Bus Incident Response Unit. He's removed the yellow cover from the bus stop to indicate everything's open again. He's also opened up the timetable panel and removed the not-very-helpful yellow posters that were giving poor advice. I have a chat with him and ask what's been going on. He tells me there have been roadworks here over the weekend and I assure him there haven't. He tells me he's been getting the stop back to normal and I thank him on behalf of local residents who've had two days of unnecessary hassle.
The impractical thing here is that the people who do the cones are not the people who do the notices. Thus the cones appeared first thing on Saturday with no explanation, but the posters and closure notices appeared hours later in a different van. Everything remained in place on Sunday because neither party realised there weren't any roadworks. Then on Monday the cones disappeared early and only later did all the closure notices come down. This may well be the most cost-effective way to do things but it does risk sending very mixed messages to passengers.
Tuesday morning
You'd think everything'd be sorted by now but there's one more team who haven't got the message and that's whoever programmes the Countdown display. Normally it'd be showing the times of all the next buses, given dozens are stopping at Bus Stop M every hour as normal. However instead it's displaying a closure notice, just like it was yesterday, with a message that's entirely untrue.
Bus Stop Closed until 17:15 24 June 2026
Please use next or previous stop to catch your bus
The electronic system still believes the stop is closed until teatime tomorrow so that's what it's telling everyone who waits here. This is also the case on all the apps and on the TfL webpage. None of this is correct.
Incidentally 'please use next stop' is worse advice than 'please use previous stop' because the next stops are even further away. That's the trouble with generic default text, it misses all the local foibles an individual bus stop might have. It wouldn't be quite such bad advice if there were a yellow poster to go with it but a) all the yellow posters were removed yesterday b) they weren't very good posters c) they're unnecessary because the stop is back open.
Wednesday evening
I wondered what would happen at 17:15 on 24 June 2026 so I made sure I was standing at Bus Stop M at the time. At 17:14 the display still showed the rubbish about the bus stop being closed. But on the stroke of 17:15 the message disappeared and was instantly replaced with the times of the next buses.
8 Tottenham CT RD due
25 Ilford due
488 Bromley-By-Bow 2 min
I was duly impressed, it really did happen to the second. The closure message on apps and the TfL website disappeared at the same time. Admittedly it took 2 minutes for the number 8 to arrive and 5 minutes before the 25 appeared round the corner, but that's fairly standard for Bus Stop M. The real issue is that no Next Bus info was visible beforehand even though it should have been. It's brilliant that a closure message can switch off at 5.15pm precisely but far less brilliant that it had been out-of-date for three days and nobody noticed.
And I mention all of this not because it's important or of consequence, but as an illustration of just how balls-ed up the closure of a bus stop can be. Bus Stop M is nothing special, it's just a bus stop I know well and whose shortcomings I can document in depth. But London has 19,000 bus stops so this kind of thing is always happening somewhere across the network, an ill-informed lack of joined-up thinking leading to a sub-par customer experience. If your local bus stop doesn't have irrelevant cones, invisible roadworks, inaccurate posters, ignorant decisions and sloppy messaging it may just be a matter of time.
