All Aboard The Night Bus

Concerned that the Greenwich night bus is due to be cut, Elise Briggs looks at the history of night buses, and what the cuts would mean for those taking the cheaper route home.

nightbus

The London Night Bus Service began in 1913, with the aim of providing a cheap means of public transport beyond the opening hours of the Underground, thus enabling people to go about their business even in the small hours.

Back in the late 1990s, Transport For London (TfL) considered axing the N53, whose 90 minute route runs from Plumstead on the Kent border straight into the heart of London, terminating at Whitehall. Thankfully, the proposal was later withdrawn.

Losing such a route such would not only be inconvenient for those who regularly use it. In addition, it would take the possibility of using it away from everyone else, chipping away at the freedom of the city – 24 hours a day, seven days a week – which we Londoners hold dear.

After all, there aren’t that many of us who can afford a taxi all the way home.

Not that the night bus is exactly heaven on wheels. Most London residents will have experienced the trials and tribulations of night buses and their riders – boarding a bus in the wee hours of a Saturday night, for example, when the stench of alcohol and vomit stings your nose and makes your stomach turn.

Sharing your journey with intoxicated party goers who are reluctant to face the end of the evening, can be quite an eye-opening experience. But the night bus was not created just to cart drunken dancers back to their boring beds. We all (including drunken dancers!) need to know that we can get back home in relative safety, without losing an arm and a leg on taxi fares. And if we can’t be sure of this, we can’t really enjoy the freedom and mobility that city life is all about.

The new proposal means closing certain routes because they are not as busy as had been thought. I can’t comment on whether they are no longer used enough to justify their existence, but I do know that other areas could benefit enormously from additional provision. In Charlton, a heavily populated area in South East London, there was only one night bus on offer, and that was a good 10 minute walk from my house. It puzzled me how a location this close to global landmarks such as the O2 could be so deserted at night – almost as if I was back in my small, home town in Southampton.

Cutting these buses could be linked to the current construction of Crossrail, which will – at long last – fully integrate South-East London into the rail and tube network. Yes, this is a big step forward. But we can’t expect Crossrail journeys to be cheap, which means that £1.45 on the bus still has a lot to be said for it.

Perhaps this modern city is slowly trying to remove the old and make way for new travel technologies which are easier to maintain and cheaper to run. But at what cost? Surely the London bus is part of the landscape; and so it should remain – morning, noon and night.

Let’s hope that plans to do away with the Greenwich night bus are not a foretaste of further cuts to come.

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