Soon, Your Night Bus Might Not Be Where You Left It

Rachel Holdsworth
By Rachel Holdsworth Last edited 106 months ago
Soon, Your Night Bus Might Not Be Where You Left It

Photo by Dora Papanikita from the Londonist Flickr pool

Aha, told you so: from September when the tube starts running all night at weekends, Transport for London is looking to change how some night bus routes run. There are various different types of changes, so let's go through them.

17 bus routes will start to run through the night on Fridays and Saturdays, though only every 30 minutes (apart from the W7; for some reason TfL thinks people wanting to go from Finsbury Park to Muswell Hill need three buses an hour to keep them happy). This is to connect passengers on those all-night tubes with buses to let them carry on with their journeys.

Some routes will have frequencies reduced on Friday and Saturday nights, because TfL assumes people will switch to the — more expensive — tube. In some cases that's only an extra couple of minutes waiting around, but if you're wedded to the 94, N91 or N20, your wait suddenly doubled or tripled.

There are some other interesting changes, too, particularly if you live around Lewisham: the 47 becomes a proper 24 hour route, instead of switching its central London start point after midnight, and will now run from Shoreditch all night. For anyone wanting to go to south east London from Trafalgar Square, TfL has created the N199 instead. The N86 also gets more buses on Friday and Saturday nights, and the N133 will be extended from Mitcham to Morden station.

To finish, the 222 and 238 get new night services seven days a week, because why not.

These plans are technically out for 'consultation', but because we genuinely can't think of a recent TfL 'consultation' that didn't then become reality (not even cashless buses, which so many people hated), consider this your heads up for night buses from September. And commit these proposals to memory now, before you next get drunk.

Last Updated 22 May 2015