This morning I took a ride on the Superloop. For the first time, Mayor Sadiq Khan wasn’t sat beside me on the top deck insisting his new express bus was a “game changer”.
I was travelling with the Standard’s podcast host, Mark Blunden. The aim was to soak up the Superloop vibe as we recorded tonight’s edition.
Why today? Because the country’s most famous son of a bus driver has outdone himself with his latest PR stunt: promising to extend the Superloop with a new route along the proposed Bakerloo line extension.
It will be called the Bakerloop (marketing genius, I admit). But it comes at a price: it’ll cost you another four years of Mr Khan at City Hall.
(Vote Susan Hall and the wheels really will come off. Only in relation to Mr Khan’s pre-election pledges, I mean.)
Unlike the Bakerloo line, the Bakerloop will take you from Elephant and Castle to Lewisham. Should it prove successful, it will all but extinguish any last hopes of ever extending the Tube’s beleaguered brown line into south-east London and Kent.
To Mr Khan’s critics, the Superloop is little but a marketing creation. Of its 10 routes originally envisaged, four involved re-badging and increasing bus frequencies on existing express routes. A fifth will co-opt the yet to be launched route between Grove Park and Canary Wharf, via the Silvertown tunnel.
The other five – most of the outer London circular “loop” – are actually new, including the SL1 that Mark and I were travelling on today.
Is the Superloop a success? TfL can’t quite say yet. Ridership is up on the re-badged routes, by about 15 percentage points higher than the rest of the London bus network.
But there are more buses, so it’s no surprise there are also more passengers. And once the reduction in passengers from “parallel” routes is factored in, the increase shrinks to about three per cent.
In principle, the Superloop is a great idea. In practice, I’m puzzled
As for the truly new routes, it won’t be until Autumn until we know. Remarkably, bus ridership statistics appear to be even harder to obtain than Ulez air quality data. But that’s irony for you.
Back to the Superloop. On our mid-morning journey today, we were among about half a dozen passengers on the top deck. That’s a lot of bus for not a lot of people. The bus zipped along merrily, aided by the limited stops and by the Easter school holidays.
Pre-holidays it was a different story. Walthamstow has two Superloop routes – the SL2 to North Woolwich is the other. These branded buses are highly visible. Especially when they’re stuck in the roads to and from Walthamstow Central station. Which is exactly what happens in rush hour.
In principle, the Superloop is a great idea. In practice, I’m puzzled. Neither of the Walthamstow routes go to the obvious places.
Why no SL1 to the Sainsbury’s superstore on the edge of the North Circular? Why not to North Middlesex hospital?
Ditto for the SL2. Why not go via Whipps Cross hospital, the Olympic park and Westfield? Why end at North Woolwich rather than City Airport? Why isn’t there a Superloop to City Hall? Why no interchange with the eastern end of the Central line?
The Superloop’s strength is the Bakerloo line’s weakness: cost. The £1.75 fare is fabulous value.
The Bakerloo line extension is £10bn and rising. In economically straitened times it’s the stuff of naive political posturing. It’ll never be built. Especially if you can get to Lewisham in half an hour on the Bakerloop.
