Only one of us was aware that a race was about to begin. At the start of the route of the C10 bus at Victoria station in central London, I mingled with a crowd of half a dozen prospective passengers. But when the bright red single-decker London bus pulled up and the doors opened, I stepped back, noted the registration number (BV20 GUG) and the time (8.47am) and waited for everyone to board. As the driver pulled away, I started to walk – with a four-mile journey, pounding the streets of the capital to see if it was possible to out-stroll a normal vehicle on a standard Transport for London service.
The route I had chosen to tackle toe-to-tyre is one of a tranche whose routes have recently been modified. The aim: to try to extract the maximum benefits for passengers at a time when transport budgets are tight. The C10 connects one of London’s most important rail stations with the South Bank, Bermondsey and the Docklands suburb of Canada Water – itself a key transport hub, with lots of buses as well as the Jubilee line of the London Underground and the Windrush line of the Overground. (This used to be known as the East London line, and is confusingly underground rather than overground at Canada Water.)
The C10 does not take the most direct route. It begins by heading southwest, away from Canada Water, scooping up passengers from Victoria before switching to an easterly track. The route meanders through Pimlico and up to Westminster Bridge, which it crosses before running to another major transport hub, London Waterloo.
Many buses run in convoy from here to Elephant & Castle, along wide thoroughfares that would be ideal for trams. But transport in London can be embarrassing. The capital bestowed the Underground railway on the world, and yet development of the subterranean metro has failed to keep pace with the growth in population. Even the landmark Elizabeth line was over three years late and £4bn over budget.
Tram lines were torn up after the Second World War, even though it is plain, a lifetime later, that they are the perfect complement to underground trains in serving dense transport corridors of a world-class city. Instead, a procession of diesel buses jostles for road space around St George’s Circus – a super-complicated junction halfway between Waterloo and “the Elephant”.
This was the first location at which I converged with the C10. Sensibly, I was walking along the most direct route, a genuinely pedestrian-friendly stroll through Westminster, crossing at Lambeth Bridge – which has, rumour suggests, been permanently subject to road works since it opened in 1932. I then cut through beside the Imperial War Museum, to reach St George’s Circus – which formerly was the venue for the smelliest factory in London, producing Sarson’s Vinegar, but is now a hub for hotels. I passed the Obelisk, in the middle of the roundabout, which details the distance to Westminster and Fleet Street (about a mile).
The C10 was nowhere to be seen; thanks to this being the 21st century, I could track my adversary, BV20 GUG. I sped past the area named and shamed by William Blake in Jerusalem for its “dark, Satanic mills” and headed through Bermondsey. By the time I reached Bermondsey Underground station, it looked as though the game was up. The C10 caught up with me and disappeared off towards the Rotherhithe peninsula.
Not all was lost. Any sensible passenger who actually wanted to go to Canada Water would hop off just beside the entrance to the Rotherhithe Tunnel (beneath the Thames) and walk in about seven minutes to Canada Water. But the C10’s final flourish is to loop around the entire peninsula, around the Stave Hill Ecological Park, before finally spiralling into Canada Water bus station.
While you see a chance, take it: I kept going, only temporarily hampered by the northwest quadrant of Southwark Park being closed to corner-cutters.
One hour and 14 minutes after departing from Victoria, I arrived at Canada Water. Had the C10 been keeping to its 75-minute schedule, I would have beaten it by 60 seconds. But my tracker showed the C10 was still five stops short of completing its journey. The driver had performed heroically against the worst that London could throw at him, but was five minutes late arriving due to road works on the Rotherhithe peninsula (which, incidentally, is a distant second to Mexico’s Baja California peninsula in terms of tourism joy).
When I explained that I had beaten him, on foot, for the full length of the journey, he smiled benignly. Perhaps he was thinking: “Is £1.75 really too much for a bus ride?” Or: “Anyone who needs to get from Victoria to Canada Water in a hurry can take the District line two stops to Westminster, then the Jubilee line, and arrive in under 20 minutes.”
Yet a bus that even a gentleman not quite in the first flush of youth can outpace on foot: what is going on?
Phil Gerhardt, TfL’s head of bus performance management, told me the C10 “plays an important role in connecting communities between Victoria and Canada Water to local shops and services, as well as to Tube, Overground and National Rail services”.
He said: “We continue to look at ways of improving the service, with a new schedule now in place to improve its performance and plans for new vehicles to improve reliability.”
Phil added that another 15 miles of new bus lanes are set for completion by the end of this year.
Now, about that tram …
Simon Calder, also known as The Man Who Pays His Way, has been writing about travel for The Independent since 1994. In his weekly opinion column, he explores a key travel issue – and what it means for you
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