if London had deregulated buses w

[Deleted]

This is just for fun! 

I was thinking if London had deregulated buses which routes would have the most competition ?  I am thinking the route 25 corridor would have a lot of operators competing?


Any thoughts on other routes or areas where operators would compete. 

[RT3062]

Oct 7, 2015 20:04:22 GMT @dan said:

This is just for fun! 

I was thinking if London had deregulated buses which routes would have the most competition ?  I am thinking the route 25 corridor would have a lot of operators competing?


Any thoughts on other routes or areas where operators would compete. 

38s would probably be a candidate too i guess.thank goodness that deregulation never came to london

[snoggle]

I think there would be a number of obvious corridors there were completely and utterly overloaded with buses. Anything in the top 30 busiest routes would fall into that territory. I suspect, though, that there are a whole pile of other corridors which at first sight aren't obvious but which are consistently busy which would attract competition. Think of routes like the 143 and 326 out of Brent Cross - plenty of trade to chase on those. Ditto the C11 or the EL1 or the 144 which all have solid flows of demand and serve multiple districts along their routes.

The London market is so huge that even average routes need more buses than some town networks sustain elsewhere. Far too many places have PVRs in single digits whereas average London routes are usually over 12 and up to 23 buses for the peak.

The other unpredictable aspect is how London's network would restructure to reflect demand changes and to shed old long standing links that may not be performing so well. Some companies might be lucky enough to find new "gold mine" routes that we don't see today. The only problem is that deregulated operators rarely have enough self funding to sustain new routes while they establish themselves. Even in London it can take up to 5 years for a route to be well grounded and to have grown sufficiently to warrant further improvements that then pull in more punters - the W19 is a good local example and even more telling given it was previously largely a commercial service by Thamesway who couldn't make it work because they couldn't run a good enough headway. The best examples are the Bromley / Orpington / Croydon routes run commercially by Metrobus for many years - they created a web of routes that do well today but also did well in "private" hands.

[vjaska]

The 109 for sure - 3rd busiest route in South East/West London and runs between two extremely important places.

[LX09FBJ]

I reckon the 726/X26 would also have had a lot of competition. There might have been more orbital, express and long distance routes (e.g. 402 and 515) running as well.

I think that the London tendering system is possibly the best compromise between competing operators and a structure, despite its many flaws. If there was no regulation then you would've ended up with say Arriva, Abellio and Metroline competing for the same route but with different fares.

The effects of privatisation have always been fancinating for me, and I would be curious to find out more.