London's least punctual and most punctual bus routes have been revealed, based on TfL data recorded over a three month period.
According to the analysis, the 603 route from Princes Avenue in Muswell Hill to Swiss Cottage station is London's most punctual route, with 85% of services spaced correctly as laid out on the TfL timetable. It's worth noting that this is a school bus — although it is open to general public — and only runs four services on weekdays in both directions.
The least punctual route is the 327 from Cocker Road in Enfield to Waltham Cross Bus Station, where just 10% of journeys stuck to the timetable. What's worse is that this is a paltry two mile journey taking 7-15 minutes, compared to the six miles covered by the reliable 603. The 327 in the opposite direction (Waltham Cross-Cocker Road) is the sixth least punctual route in London. The 422 and 385 each feature on the top ten least punctual routes in both directions too, leaving us wondering if roadworks or another anomaly affected the results during the time the data was recorded.
As well as ranking routes on punctuality, the data has ranked individual bus stops on which stops are most likely to have buses running late — and, equally frustratingly, running early — ranked by zone. Bishops Bridge stop, serving route 46 and loctaed between Paddington station and Westway is the worst zone 1 offender for late arrivals, followed by Friend Street Sadlers Wells.
Silk Street, which serves the 153 near Barbican, was the zone 1 stop where buses are most likely to arrive early.
The numbers have been crunched by individual postcodes too, and unsurprisingly, outer London postcodes seem to be the most reliable. The top three postcodes for bus punctuality are BR3 (Beckenham), RM14 (Upminster) and KT8 (Hampton Court). If you think that outer buses are more reliable because they're less susceptible to London's gridlocked road, consider this; DA7 (Barnehurst), UB7 (Harmondsworth) and TW12 (Hampton) are the three most unreliable postcodes.
The data and analysis has been published by big data analytics programme Kognitio, which used 4,938,534,706 data points, 19,687 individual bus stops, 675 bus routes and 9,641 buses over a three month period. All the data came from the TfL API, meaning all routes included were operated by TfL (important to note when looking at London's fringes). More information on the methods used can be found here.
Take a look at all the data here and see how your bus stop/route/postcode fares when compared to the rest of London.
