Reading Orbiter

I was having a chat with friends about the public transport situation in Reading. We were wondering how it could ever reduce private car journeys.

In fact, Reading’s got quite a good bus service. My neighbourhood has the number five that runs every seven minutes. I don’t know any other suburban service this frequent, not that my knowledge of bus services is in any way comprehensive.

The point though is that a seven-minute frequency, which is almost as good as you will find in central London, is a frequency that’s high enough to encourage casual public transport users to use the service, because you don't have to plan when you are going to leave to catch the bus. In an impatient world, with a cold winter wind, the idea of waiting at a bus stop for anywhere up to half an hour is just not on. Less than ten minutes, on the other hand, is pretty much tolerable.

So what’s the point of mentioning bus frequency? Well, that was the next thought. The seven-minute bus wait is in the cold is fine if you want to go into town. But what if you don’t want to go into town - instead, you want to travel from your home turf and visit another of Reading’s racy suburbs? Currently, all of Reading’s bus routes are radial; they run from one of the suburbs into the town centre (honourable exceptions: 9 and 17 which are cross-Reading, north–south and east–west respectively). The only way to hop from burb to burb is by taking a bus most or all of the way into town until the route intersects with another radial service. Then you change buses onto the other service. So far, so good. But there are two snags: firstly, you need a new ticket (something you can solve with a day pass). Secondly, you’ll probably have a fair wait at the intermediate stop. There's no way two radial, unrelated bus services can be timed to intersect with one another. There's little likelihood that all Reading's bus services will run at frequent intervals. That basically means that there are quite a few journeys that are unfeasible. I never use public transport when going from my place in Whitley Wood over to Earley, Woodley or Tilehurst; I’ll cycle if the weather's OK, or drive. And the same goes for everyone else.

So my idea is to introduce an orbital service. It’ll cross over all the existing bus routes and connect up all the suburbs. And as it crosses each one, it can wait at the stop for that service to arrive, allowing people to change buses without standing in the cold. OK, so it won't be that quick, but I bet it would be popular. Now where’s that second-hand Routemaster?