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Post by sid on Mar 21, 2017 9:27:08 GMT
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Post by T.R. on Mar 21, 2017 10:39:04 GMT
An example of non-route branding for LTs at [HT]: the "To and from the West End" strapline would be suitable 24, 91 and 390 buses.
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Post by M1104 on Mar 21, 2017 11:40:35 GMT
Perhaps Mandela Way could brand up some of their relevant deckers, advertising it as "the number 1 route in London". lol
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Post by smiler52 on Mar 21, 2017 11:58:36 GMT
route branding is pointless if they are anything like first Southampton and stick route branded buses out on any route
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Post by bigbaddom1981 on Mar 21, 2017 12:42:27 GMT
I can't see the point in route branding, people barely notice a destination change. I've lost count of how many times I've been on a 192 going past Ikea and people get on the bus go one stop and get off as it's not going Tottenham Hale.
Surely the solution is to make routings and the actual bus more attractive. All buses should have wifi especially in a digital world that we live in. Routes should be more thought out so they serve places more efficiently. They should look at Sunday timetables that for the most part are inadequate for Sunday's particularly during shopping hours.
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Post by Nathan on Mar 21, 2017 12:50:56 GMT
Perhaps Mandela Way could brand up some of their relevant deckers, advertising it as "the number 1 route in London". lol "45Free travel to the West End"
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Post by snoggle on Mar 21, 2017 13:02:59 GMT
I can't see the point in route branding, people barely notice a destination change. I've lost count of how many times I've been on a 192 going past Ikea and people get on the bus go one stop and get off as it's not going Tottenham Hale. Surely the solution is to make routings and the actual bus more attractive. All buses should have wifi especially in a digital world that we live in. Routes should be more thought out so they serve places more efficiently. They should look at Sunday timetables that for the most part are inadequate for Sunday's particularly during shopping hours. Pretty much agree with all of that. The other interesting "digital" thing is that TfL perhaps needs to look at the quality of data as put out via smartphones. I've lost track of the number of bewildered people at Tottenham Hale gawping at their smartphones looking for a stop for the bus to IKEA and being pointed to the first stop on Watermead Way rather than the one in the bus station a few centimetres away from where they standing looking lost! I so far have a 100% success rate of spotting "lost" people and pointing them at the right stop.
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Post by sid on Mar 21, 2017 14:06:02 GMT
I can't see the point in route branding, people barely notice a destination change. I've lost count of how many times I've been on a 192 going past Ikea and people get on the bus go one stop and get off as it's not going Tottenham Hale. Surely the solution is to make routings and the actual bus more attractive. All buses should have wifi especially in a digital world that we live in. Routes should be more thought out so they serve places more efficiently. They should look at Sunday timetables that for the most part are inadequate for Sunday's particularly during shopping hours. Whilst I agree with most of what you've said, but they are completely different issues, I don't for the life of me see how route branding is pointless? Have the many operators who use route branding really got it all wrong? Would the Oxford Tube/Express services for example really be better if they were operated with anonymous unbranded vehicles?
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Post by vjaska on Mar 21, 2017 14:26:09 GMT
I can't see the point in route branding, people barely notice a destination change. I've lost count of how many times I've been on a 192 going past Ikea and people get on the bus go one stop and get off as it's not going Tottenham Hale. Surely the solution is to make routings and the actual bus more attractive. All buses should have wifi especially in a digital world that we live in. Routes should be more thought out so they serve places more efficiently. They should look at Sunday timetables that for the most part are inadequate for Sunday's particularly during shopping hours. But people do notice adverts on the sides of buses and branding is a form of advertising so I think it's workable. I do agree with the second paragraph though.
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Post by mondraker275 on Mar 21, 2017 17:51:58 GMT
I had a feeling TfL had lost the plot over buses, but this confirms it. STOP this utter nonsense while it is in paper form. As much as route branding seems quite good lets not delude ourselves. Why is money going to be spent to tell people information that is probably 95% known. People who dont take buses, generally know that there will probably be a bus or buses that takes them from A to B. Its London. What happens is that the person sees a bus regularly outside their Home or point 'A', i.e. 275 Highams Park and then sees that said bus again at their destination B, say Woodford, and then thinks, wow I did not know it went there, I will take the 275, there instead of the car. Route branding would be a very inefficient way to reach about maybe 10 people in every 100,000. Where does anyone who needs a bus go?, a bus stop, and so information at the bus stop is more important and sufficient. Queue TfL's next big plan, ' we need GIANT FOAM FINGERS' to point people to bus stops. What about the revenue loss from advertising space lost??? TfL needs to the income. There are bigger issues at hand with buses. Who is running TfL?? There are always bigger issues at hand so that's a red herring. How does this confirm that TfL have lost the plot? Route branding is comparatively inexpensive to apply so if you're worried about the cost to use your own analogy there are far bigger issues. If you tackle the biggest issues there will be no bigger issues, whereas if you start on the bottom of the priority list then there will always be bigger issues. I think it will be pretty expensive, but it is more the inefficiency I have issues with. The returns you will get in terms of new passengers/journeys compared to cost, I dont know how TfL deem this worthwhile. Also, as mentioned advertising revenue would probably be effected, routes will change with the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street, and so the time is not now, if ever. It drives me bonkers that TfL would not consider Bus priority, something like all buses using Bow Flyover, but somehow this gets the go ahead to solve a non-issue. Buses that are stuck in traffic like the 58, get a frequency reduction? Yet there are funds to stick the frequency on the side of buses. We know how they are dealing with consultations as well, including the bizarre diversion of W11, which has not happened on time!, rumours that some proposals will not go ahead because there are no funds. Yeah, so I pretty much think they have lost the plot for now.
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Post by sid on Mar 21, 2017 18:01:47 GMT
There are always bigger issues at hand so that's a red herring. How does this confirm that TfL have lost the plot? Route branding is comparatively inexpensive to apply so if you're worried about the cost to use your own analogy there are far bigger issues. If you tackle the biggest issues there will be no bigger issues, whereas if you start on the bottom of the priority list then there will always be bigger issues. I think it will be pretty expensive, but it is more the inefficiency I have issues with. The returns you will get in terms of new passengers/journeys compared to cost, I dont know how TfL deem this worthwhile. Also, as mentioned advertising revenue would probably be effected, routes will change with the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street, and so the time is not now, if ever. It drives me bonkers that TfL would not consider Bus priority, something like all buses using Bow Flyover, but somehow this gets the go ahead to solve a non-issue. Buses that are stuck in traffic like the 58, get a frequency reduction? Yet there are funds to stick the frequency on the side of buses. We know how they are dealing with consultations as well, including the bizarre diversion of W11, which has not happened on time!, rumours that some proposals will not go ahead because there are no funds. Yeah, so I pretty much think they have lost the plot for now. They're completely separate issues whatever the rights and wrongs of them are.
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Post by ServerKing on Mar 21, 2017 18:55:27 GMT
There are always bigger issues at hand so that's a red herring. How does this confirm that TfL have lost the plot? Route branding is comparatively inexpensive to apply so if you're worried about the cost to use your own analogy there are far bigger issues. If you tackle the biggest issues there will be no bigger issues, whereas if you start on the bottom of the priority list then there will always be bigger issues. I think it will be pretty expensive, but it is more the inefficiency I have issues with. The returns you will get in terms of new passengers/journeys compared to cost, I dont know how TfL deem this worthwhile. Also, as mentioned advertising revenue would probably be effected, routes will change with the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street, and so the time is not now, if ever. It drives me bonkers that TfL would not consider Bus priority, something like all buses using Bow Flyover, but somehow this gets the go ahead to solve a non-issue. Buses that are stuck in traffic like the 58, get a frequency reduction? Yet there are funds to stick the frequency on the side of buses. We know how they are dealing with consultations as well, including the bizarre diversion of W11, which has not happened on time!, rumours that some proposals will not go ahead because there are no funds. Yeah, so I pretty much think they have lost the plot for now. Using the Bow Flyover is good if I don't want to get off at the stop by the McDonalds by the roundabout and jump on an 8 if I'm switching from a 25 As for the 'frequencies every XX minutes' plastered on the sides of the bus, in today's litigious world, I will be first to claim compensation if the bus I'm waiting for falls out of these specific times that are promised on the sides of the bus. After Boris Johnson's NHS Coach which started Brexit, I think people are wary of false promises stuck on the sides of vehicles... Just tart up the buses, put LED (MBK1-style) blinds on, WiFi and give operators back 80% red and a bring a little individuality to the bus scene again. But before all of that, the chronic traffic problem needs to be tackled. Today I walked the length of Kingsway from Aldwych, and then continued walking to Chinatown/Soho as the traffic put me off waiting for a 1 then a 242 and a short walk. Unless a bus is new and shiny, no one's going to pay it much attention. And because they look all the same, no one's going to look at the pathetic branding they may have in mind as shown a couple of pages back Having seen Garston garage struggle to put neat fleet numbers on the 268 ENL's (ex Stagecoach), I think a professional company should do branding, if any
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Post by bigbaddom1981 on Mar 21, 2017 19:03:10 GMT
To be fair I never said route branding was pointless , I said I don't see the point of it, similar but not the same. I think there is use for it but perhaps not in London.
For the wealth of information available, there are many ways to identify a route and where it goes. There are timetables available at the bus stops highlighting the main stops as well as spider maps. We also have journey planner and to some extent many phone apps for countdown. On some of these apps you can see every stop on a bus route.
Whilst I agree that advertising on the side of a bus is very lucrative and successful, I don't think you can apply the same logic to a bus route map. The majority of people who use a bus route have used it before and so this wouldn't be of any use to the majority that use it. Of the minority who are unfamiliar, they invariably have planned their route as the common sense approach to making an unknown journey is to plan it.
As mentioned before I think the key to making buses great again is about making the buses themselves useful such as wifi and more interactive. By interactive imagine getting on a bus and using an app to sync with be bus to give live onboard information such as stop information, live traffic information, diversions and connections. I think buses could be cleaner and sometimes maintenance can be very close to being poor. This could be damaged or worn seats, buses with rusty door mechanisms, fading paint work etc.
Buses where they need to be is key too. Buses should feed train stations as this is the most effective way to move people about. It's a lot more expensive to create new routes using trains than it is buses. Every route should be fit for purpose and it's effectiveness reviewed at each tender award.
I know I bang on about route 192 as much as @serverking does about LED blinds, but I use this route day in day out and it's not fit for purpose, it often runs at capacity, the buses can be unreliable which is why we get 02 reg and ex first e200s on the route. The route can't have higher frequencies due to the narrow roads between Edmonton and Enfield, but as has been suggested before there are ways to correct this without tearing up routes and starting again. It's this kind of review and quality of service that drives people a way from buses and onto other methods as it's just not a comfortable journey.
I know it's not easy to please every passenger but if it was only a few then the numbers wouldn't be decreasing at the rate they are.
Also while I'm in rant mode, I'm sure TfL uses oyster data to compile passenger data, however there are a number factors that can contribute to the figures:
The more LTs we have on the road, the more chance that people won't touch in and therefore that passenger journey isn't registered.
Sometimes I get on a bus and the oyster reader isn't working.
Number of times I've seen drivers who let people on with Oyster card problems when it doesn't scan or they don't have one (often youths)
I'm sure we could debate this subject to death, but this is my view
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Post by londonbusexplorer on Mar 21, 2017 19:42:11 GMT
This is very nice idea but can have some flaws. Bus garages never stick to an allocation and this is just making rare workings more unlikely to happen in my opinion.
If they brought the Heathrow Fast A10 branding and the "First Class Along The Uxbridge Road" 607 branding back then TFL have a good taste in branding but if it's like that VLA18 trash then it's ok but looks extremely cheap and something I can do by going to my local Homebase, pick up a pot of Black Dulux and paint the sections I need to paint, then just print the rest on sticky paper. If you're gonna bring branding back, make it look good like the Heathrow Fast one which shows a unique touch for each service.
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Post by M1199 on Mar 21, 2017 21:06:15 GMT
If your gonna do route branding, you gotta make a decent effort at it. If you think back to the 90's, you had the 607 Express, X43 Red Express, you had the branded Routemasters on the 6/7/12/23/36/98, all the Freeflow Heathrow branded buses: A10 Heathrow Fast, 105 Local Link, 140 Local Link, 285 Local Link, 490 Local Link & 555/6/7 Heathrow Connection, even the R68 Travel fit for a King plus all the other slogans the R68 had, then you also had the branding applied to the 57 and 281. There's probably a whole host more that I've not mentioned too! I'm guessing that most of these would of been designed by Ray Stenning/Best Impressions?
That branding applied to VLA18 looks terrible! Cheap and tacky! Looks like something my 7 yr old niece would knock up on Microsoft Paint! Worst still, TfL have most probably paid someone thousands to design it...........
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