The Bus Chronicles: Of storms and super stops

A very happy Andy Burnham. Image TfGM, 2023.

When the Met office announced the arrival of Storm Éowyn this week I found myself thinking "Oh bloody hell, here we go again..." 

Three weeks into January and three weeks into the Bee Network and it had just been beginning to feel as though things were just starting to settle. Only to be upended again.

So far Stockport's buses at least seem to have remained unaffected by Éowyn, though apparently some train lines around Hazel Grove have been knackered by the winds so - as with the flooding and snow earlier in the month - we haven't got off scot free. With more weather warnings for this weekend and into next week, it is possible that there will be further disruption. I mean, the residents of Meadow Mill are only just back in their homes after being flooded on New Years Day, so who knows?

With fresh bad weather on the cards, now feels like an opportune moment to talk about the super stops.

What is a super stop? It's essentially a bus stop that serves multiple bus routes. 

If you live, as I did for many years, on the main transport artery through Stockport that is the A6, you won't ever really need to figure out where your nearest super stop is because there are so many buses going down the A6 that it's largely irrelevant: Most stops are super stops. But if, as I once did and now do again, live somewhere or work somewhere that is only served by one bus route, you soon find out where your nearest super stop is. 

There was a time when I worked on Oxford Road in Manchester, a road which is full of super stops. Despite this, the 191 service was (for a mercilessly short period of time) so bad that I found myself walking down Plymouth Grove to Longsight Library to get the bus home. This was because the stop on Oxford Road gave me access to the 191 and 197 but it didn't give me access to the 192 and the stop in Longsight did.

I found myself reflecting on this experience at the tail end of the week before last when, having walked three stops to catch the 385 at a stop that was nearer the one for the 383, and the 385 not having turned up (again...) I ended up missing the quarter to five 383 because it had left the stop in the five minutes it took me to walk from the 385 stop to it. "Surely" I thought, "there's got to be a better way of doing this". 

As I waited for the 383 that was due to come at 5 past the hour, I remembered the 191 experience and started to calculate in my head how long it would take me to walk to the nearest bus stop that served the 385, 383 and 358. I knew where it was, but what I didn't know was how long it would take to walk there from work and whether the timings would work out with the bus timetables for all three routes. 

To explain, I finish work at 4pm. Between 4pm and 4:25pm, there are no buses. Well, there is one at about 2 minutes past four but it's at the stop that's a ten minute walk away, so that can automatically be discounted. This means that there is a kind of dead time for buses that lasts half an hour, given that the bus at 25 past is often late. I calculated that it would probably take me about 25-30 minutes to walk to my identified super stop, by which point the first of the three buses of the 4:30-5pm slot would be due. Given that the 383 at 4:25pm is always rammed to the gills and you always have to stand or, on a particularly bad day, spend your entire journey squashed up against the perspex grill of the drivers cab, I was not upset about the prospect of missing it. 

The bus due after that would be the 385, which has variable reliability at the moment, and the one after that was another 383, which tended to be early or on time. Then you were looking at post 5pm buses. The 358 is only once an hour and is often late so it's only really in the calculations as a random factor: It might surprise you and turn up in an opportune moment, then again it probably won't.

At this moment in time, all of the buses going to Marple (ie the 385, 383 and 358) were running approximately 15 minutes late most days. This was a real pain in the arse given that I was waiting for a bus (the 385) that only runs once an hour. The 383 runs every 20 minutes so it's lateness was marginally less of a pain in the arse than with the other two: It would be late but, what with it being every 20 minutes, one of them would arrive eventually and - in theory - you wouldn't have to wait too long for one. 

I should say at this point that the super stop on the way into work is only a ten minute walk away. I started using this super stop on the 6th January because of the snow, and only stopped using it this week because I was fed up of ending up on the (late) 384 instead of the 385, and having to walk the rest of the way to work rather than being dropped off outside. I eventually worked out that the 385's reliability at 7:30am was stronger than at 4:30pm and that, as such, it wasn't really worth trekking up the hill and across the grass verge to the super stop every morning. If the 385 doesn't turn up in the morning, I can walk to a different super stop in a slightly different direction that is further down the route.

Stockport by LS Lowry

For now the super stop on the way home feels like it's worth continuing to use, if only because there's nothing more frustrating than standing at the 385 stop from 4pm until 4:50pm waiting for a bus that clearly isn't coming, and then having to walk ten minutes down the road to the nearest 383 stop. 

I am hoping that, eventually, reliability will improve - and there have been flashes of progress in this regard over the past week - but it's not there yet, and the super stop acts as insurance against things going wrong.

Perhaps the most ridiculous thing about the super stop, certainly the one on the way home, is that it's a half hour walk and it only actually takes me about 45 minutes to walk home: I can literally walk all the way home from work in the time it would take me to get home by bus. 

Why not simply walk home then? Well, at the most basic level, it's a horrible walk: It involves busy main roads with multiple hills and there are stretches of road where there's only pavement on one side, and it's often not the side you want it to be on. This means that you have to keep crossing over the road, taking extra time. It really is more fun taking the bus. You can be home in 15 minutes. When the bus turns up that is.