It's really a complete mystery as to how the London Transport Bus network was so badly contracted in 1970 when the state owed National Bus Company was formed which nationalised a great many bus companies all over the Country.London Transport ran Red and Green Buses, had a bus garage network all over the Hinterland of London way beyond the M25. Crawley, Guildford, Harlow, Dartford, Stevenage, Hatfield, Godstone to name just a few. All part of the London Transport bus network with Green Line Coaches linking in to the Centre of London from all the satellite towns. Fully integrated and highly organised.And of a Higher comfort quality both for passengers than almost any urban city home or abroad. Highly envied from afar.Most important was the complete infrastructure to do this as efficiently as possible. But is was even then, a public service not a profit machine. Everything was based on efficiency but in a far more human way. Staff were valued and came with better than average pensions and a full range of benefits and social facilities.Since then the original successor to the Green bus and Green Line services, London Country, gradually disintegrated and what is left is a mish mash of private operators with a constant merry go go round of buyouts, failure and contract issues and no cohesive outer London Bus services yet at a time where London has grown out into those beyond the Green Belt conurbations.At roughly the same time, London Transport passed into the hands of the GLC and became a political toy in a far larger way than before, and the rot set in.Half baked ideas, parachuted in management, political games, along with a lot of industrial action led to a surge in car ownership from the almost constant disruption from unreliability.That in hand led to the neglect and purchase of unsuitable buses and route cuts and curtailments.It was not until Ken Livingstone's GLC Fares Fares policy that the rot was stopped and reversed with the greatest drop in daily car use in just months.That was killed off by yet again, posture politics and then decline really set in until Ken Livingstone and the Bus Plus initiative which was a big success.But in the intervening years since, TfL has completely lost the plot with the folly of Metronet and Tube Lines and selling off Bus infrastructure rendering even tendered companies to be volatile in their viability.The Mayor and TfL and various Govts have handled it appallingly with very bad management of funds.Something is really wrong when the books only balance when serious overcrowding is the point of break even.Huge salaries for below average talent, an over politicised culture, a disdain for lifetime industry know how, degradation of front line staff terms, conditions and pay, the dependence on contracting out everything and the loss of a wide network and strategic infrastructure of near self sufficiency and now half a century of all this, is a bad reflection. The current form of Management by the Mayor and TfL is not any better, in fact, much worse as the policies have taken the whole bus network reversing at speed into a very unstable and volatile and irreversible state.And mainly because of egos and the usual band who do very nicely out of the 'managed decline' culture.And as for the disintegration of outer London services? That is where the lessons ought to have been learned. It's clear they have not.What London's Bus network has is better than most others in the UK but is now in a really short term predicament and a shadow of what it was. Less able to weather a crisis and placed in the situation of polices without long term depth.
Raymond Havelock ● 395d