Branch lines.
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Wikipedia
Central Line map |
Look at the Northern Line, to the south it has Battersea Power Station and Morden. To the north it has Edgware and High Barnet/Mill Hill East.
Branches.
Or even other lines with many destinations on one end, then all converge to one at another, Metropolitan at Aldgate for example.
Branches.
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| Current 166 and 466 |
The tube can do it, some buses used to bifurcate (on some routes, like 32 with journeys from Grahame Park Estate, or N25 to Hainault/Harold Hill, N109/N159 to Coulsdon/New Addington), why not buses in 21st century?
The answer is standardisation above all else.
Perhaps there's still scars from confusion of the past (e.g 137 not running on evenings/Sundays but 137A extended from Clapham to Oxford Circus on evenings/Sundays) with suffixes on hundreds of bus routes with variations of all kinds, making it a must for you to know the structure of your bus routes (beyond if they run or don't run) in order to not have a bad day/evening.
Out of our 549 daily routes, there's only 5 examples of two routes in one contract (e.g 389/399).
Quite impressive as it is excessive. Efficiency loss as well from a few factors. Imagine counting +1 on your calculator for every number, with the very rare +2 from the 389/399 example. Ridiculous oversimplification, but you have a little idea now.
The EL1/EL2 from 2010 until 2016 did count. A shared service between Ilford and Thames View Estate, where EL2 diverted further to Dagenham Dock. Obviously no more shared service from 2016 onwards as both routes had sharply increased in frequencies, then EL2 diverted to Becontree Heath instead of Ilford.
The objective is simple: Smarter distribution of buses with the least passenger inconvenience.
Preferably, without reducing frequencies on core parts of a route, compared to completely reducing frequencies haphazardly for the sake of costs..
