Farewell, the 118

I've occasionally used the 118, the South London bus route that runs from Morden to Brixton. It passes by the lovely parks and houses bordered by the Wandle, before taking in the greenery of Mitcham Common, the grey suburbia of Streatham, before finishing off by the bustling area of Brixton. It's travelled for most of this route since 1942, and has kept its current route since 1990. Allow me to gripe about the current plans. [Consultation linked here.]

Transport for London do not care that the 118 has been doing this for nearly a century, and as such have decided to guillotine the route. Except they haven't - it's merely getting rebranded. Only ten years ago, the 45 bus route used to run from Clapham Park to King's Cross, but has since been truncated to Elephant and Castle. TfL's ingenious solution is to thus remove the 118, have the 45 run from Morden up to Brixton and then beyond to Camberwell Green, and then have the 59 bus route, which is otherwise unrelated, go down to Clapham Park instead. So the 118 isn't dead, TfL have merely lied to us.

TfL have replaced bus routes like this before. When they axed the 82 in 2017, it was actually the 13 they killed off, the 82 merely got renumbered. Same with the 16 and 332 two years ago - in all these instances, TfL have decided that if the route has a lower number, then that number gets preserved, even if the route doesn't.

In this instance, though, I think TfL have been rather stupid. The 45 has only twenty-nine bus stops, yet only sixteen will continue to be served by a 45 bus route - hence 45% of the route will no longer be served by it. Of those sixteen, the 45 and 118 only share seven bus stops - hence only a third of the old 45 will be truly preserved with the new 45. In fact, here's a useful pie chart that illustrates how ludicrous it is to keep the 45 number:

The reason why this matters to me isn't because I have an affinity to the 118 route - as I said earlier, I don't use it all that often. The main issue is that TfL have decided to intentionally renumber this route, probably as a ploy to pretend that the 45 isn't being murdered. The 45, after all, is a historically significant route itself, though not in this rump state incarnation.

This renumbering ultimately means that TfL will have spent more time, money, and labour on replacing those small tiles that are on bus stops from 118 to 45, not forgetting those they need to remove from Elephant to Camberwell. According to a Freedom of Information request, that cost can vary from £4,000 to £8,000 depending on the route itself - so either way, the price will be significant, but surely it should be the aim to minimise it. More importantly, though, TfL have decided to forego the fact that for eighty years, people living along the 118 have known it being there. The few days of confusion as everyone adapts isn't particularly worth it; I know it would be a similar issue for the 45 around Camberwell, but it would have been on a smaller scale. Perhaps I'm wrong, though, and am blowing this out of proportion. After all, there have been posters put up outside bus stops telling customers about this change - they all say the 118 is being axed, though, which I have already stated isn't really true.

When I took the 118 for a few stops from outside Morden Hall Park, along the dull suburbian Wandle Road to southern Mitcham, there were no onboard announcements that the route would shortly be axed. Perhaps people knew that it wouldn't be gone, perhaps TfL knew that would just confuse more people, or perhaps I merely arrived too early to the farewell party. The route tiles still had the 118 on them, but I was passing through Streatham and it turns out that the workers have been very busy, and have installed new 45 plates - which I reckon could prove more confusing, even if efficient.

 On the 1st February, the 118 will no longer run in London. Most people won't mind, to them it's just a number on a vehicle which happens to take them to places they want to be at. Some will lament the loss of a workhorse of south London. Some won't care at all, after all we should be concerned about various wars and foreign governments and the fact that people can't afford to buy food or to turn on the heating whilst wealthy oligarchs get to dodge taxes without significant repercussion. Hell, in most of the UK people could only dream of such great bus routes. However, I think TfL's main loss here is about communication. Their desire to have a lovely palette of bus route numbers (aside from 10, 48, 82, 84, ...) has caused numbers like the 507, 521, and 549 to suddenly vanish, without the resulting area truly benefitting from the changes. 

Why can't big organisations be better at being practical and making lots of sense? If we all had a series of good standards, life would be so much easier. We could begin by making logical bus route numbering decisions.