Bus journey running time reductions?

I see First South Yorkshire have bought some new flying buses to glide over traffic from end of the month that don’t have GreenRoad fitted...

Route 22A/22C in Rotherham goes from a 1hr 2 min round trip (which is often late due to traffic congestion through Parkgate) to a 53 min round trip with no change of route...

Some serious running time reductions over a number of other routes in the Doncaster area too (41/41A, 50/50A/50B etc.).

Hopefully not a recipe for disaster but it did get me thinking - have we seen any routes across the UK actually have running time reductions? Certainly a rarity that I can think of.

Yes when I worked at Arriva myself and a colleague re-wrote the evening 5/5a timetable on Teesside to bring the round trip time down from 2h15 to 2h00 - it didn't save a bus but it made the evening timetable the same times every hour. Brought what was an incredibly slack journey down to something more realistic.

Installation of bus lanes where there weren't any before might allow for that perhaps? Don't know any specific cases, though.

My old local bus route in Bolton ran for many years with one bus taking 14 minutes each way. One day, it became 12 minutes each way as part of an extension to the route and reliability fell through the floor...

Ianno87 said:

My old local bus route in Bolton ran for many years with one bus taking 14 minutes each way. One day, it became 12 minutes each way as part of an extension to the route and reliability fell through the floor...

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It has long been a tradition for bus companies to produce timetables based on the office apprentice ragging round the route in his bodykitted Vauxhall Corsa.

Bletchleyite said:

It has long been a tradition for bus companies to produce timetables based on the office apprentice ragging round the route in his bodykitted Vauxhall Corsa.

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What was even better was the company having to remove use of Low Floor Buses on the route, as drivers were having to crash over the speed bumps on the route to keep time, trashing their suspensions. Imagime trying this now (this was mid-2000s)