Local buses

Following complaints I've received about the quality of some of the local bus routes, I've been looking into the reliability of buses throughout the constituency.

Most of our bus services now run very frequently indeed; the improvements in public transport since Ken Livingstone became Mayor of London are significant. Buses are now cleaner, safer, more reliable and 24-hour routes like the 85 have made a real difference to more remote parts of the constituency like Roehampton and Putney Vale.

The average time people have to wait for borough buses is just over four minutes. The longest waiting times are for the 493 bus, that seems to visit everywhere in South West London - but even here the average wait is supposedly just 7 minutes (though there is a 1 in 4 chance that passengers will end up waiting up to 20 minutes, according to the stats - and that chimes with my experiences of this route).

There are, however, some routes that I want to see improvements in. The reliability of three routes: the 493, the 265 which goes down Lower Richmond Road and up Roehampton Lane towards Tolworth; and the 337 which runs along Upper Richmond Road between Richmond and Clapham Junction also leave something to be desired.

You can download the bus service reliability report here; and I'd like to hear from you about your own experiences of public transport - good and bad - not just buses but tube and train journeys too. Of course, there is more to a good travel experience than the amount of time you have to wait.