I have never liked buses. When I was a lazy teenager I used to use the 81/82 Hutton Circular to get to the local town and back again and I could regularly be heard whining about how £2.90 was not a reasonable price for a six mile round trip on an uncomfortable and overcrowded old minibus which usually smelt of who-knows-what and had suspension like a trampoline. Then I learned to drive and I didn't have to worry about buses any more outside the occasional bus I'd catch in London when the tube drivers were on strike. Bliss.
Fast forward a decade and a half or so and I'm waiting outside KFC in Ilford for the bus home. Since I moved within the travelcard zones bus travel has again become a way of life when getting around, the roads aren't too bad but buses are cheap (I can catch as many of them as I like for £4.40 per day), quite comfortable, plentiful and regular. I do, however, wonder how some of them make any money given the amount of empty buses that thunder past while I'm on a wander, especially in the evenings. But nothing compares to the emptiness that is the 167.
The 167 is the bus I need to get me home from nights out in Romford. Despite now living in Loughton, I am loathe to give up my social life and while a lot of that involves travel to and from London (not a problem), I still find myself in Romford on a regular basis. Despite being only seven miles from my home, there is no direct public transport route there so the journey home involves the 86 bus to Ilford followed by the 167 to Loughton. The first bus is relatively well used, with a smattering of people spread across both decks, however once you change to the 167 it's like you've transported yourself into a parallel dimension where using the bus is something to be ashamed of. It starts at Ilford yet is always late - the other day it was 28 minutes late and two turned up at once, quite a feat for a bus which has half hourly timetable intervals - and no-one travels on it. I have frequented it several times in the past six weeks yet I can count the fellow passengers that have shared part of the journey with me on one hand and one of those got on it by mistake and was off again at the next stop. It's like my own personal bus to Loughton station.
Of course when your bus is as empty as this all the time - and I have caught it at varying times of the day - one worries just how long TfL will keep running it. Most bus companies elsewhere in the country would have given it the chop already, there was a couple of months back in the later part of last decade where the aforementioned 81 and 82 service was cut, and that had much higher patronage than the 167 does (it was axed because "too many pensioners" made FirstBus' profits for the route slim). I can only guess that the other, more busy routes around the area like the number 20 keep it afloat. So next time you're on a packed bus into the city, take a moment to celebrate how that route allows people like me a decent bus service despite living way out in the boondocks.
