A similar story on the consultation to withdraw the 654 which closed not too long ago. 85% opposed the changes but guess what they’re doing…
85%
of respondents opposed the changes. But how often will people who aren't bothered either way going to make the effort to respond to a consultation like that? Inevitably – and even with a change that
would actively benefit some people – the ones who are against it will mobilise the loudest.
Do you think any route withdrawal would ever have a majority in favour? How would any route withdrawals or other "negative" schemes ever happen if consultation was treated as a referendum?
Exactly!
What’s the point of a consultation if nothing that comes from the respondents will make any difference?
It allows TfL to gauge the strength of feeling – I'm sure they will have a threshold where they consider the number of responses received in relation to the number of people who might be affected to determine whether there is a
significant amount of opposition to it – and it may also allow people to suggest factors or alternatives that they hadn't thought of in the first place and that they may need to take into account. But as Goldfish said, it's a consultation and not a vote – TfL can legitimately listen to the negative responses and still decide that those responses don't outweigh the benefits of the changes and so go ahead with the cuts.
To those of us located somewhere in the country other than London, the fact you get a consultation process at all is astounding.
Very true. Even for council or PTE funded services, there is rarely a public consultation on changes, let alone for commercially operated services, where widespread changes can be imposed with a few weeks' notice.
When mayors outside of London talk about ‘London style bus services’ they never mention stuff like this. There has been numerous bus services cut in Central London over the last few years. Roads that had two services to different places often now have one, or where they had three they now have two.
The ‘hopper fare’ seems to always be the get out clause and lets TFL get away with a lot of these changes. Yes you’ll have to get off somewhere and wait 12 minutes at a random bus stop for another service, but at least it won’t cost any more.
There is an argument that central London was over-bussed a few years ago, with too many routes duplicating each other, leading to lightly used buses that were costly to operate and added to congestion. With TfL being unusual for a capital city transport authority in the developed world by
not getting any operational funding from central government, its options for maintaining a viable network
and investing in the future are limited. If buses run at least every 10 minutes and the hopper fare means passengers aren't having to pay more for a multi-leg journey, it isn't a huge inconvenience for most people to change and so it does seem sensible to try to minimise those losses by trimming back the network to more of a hub-and-spoke model – especially given how congested the roads are, it's hardly a good use of scarce resources to have loads of buses out there crawling along at 5mph.
