The Bee Network in Greater Manchester is renumbering some services back into the old Greater Manchester PTE three-digit series, apparently to “avoid confusion.”
There may well be a service 7 in each of Stockport and Wigan, but I doubt that anyone has ever caught the wrong one. So Wigan’s local services get a surplus 600. In a network “driven by you,” I doubt renumbering routes rates as a high priority.
In the early 1980s, I recall National Bus Company research finding that smaller service numbers were both more memorable and more ‘sellable’, and that passengers understood that a 7A was like a 7 better than their grasp of a 508 being like a 507.
Since then, networks have duplicated small numbers in local areas, and all but the obsessively minded were content.
Proliferation of three-digit numbers followed early computerisation and the creation of PTEs. If you were lucky, your service got a few hundred added. If not, something like a random number generator applied. “What stand does the 7-0-what used to be the 2 and the 10 go from?”
Nobody thought of having a different ‘internal’ number to that shown on the bus. Some operators like Eastern Counties and Ribble went to the extreme of having a different number for every variation. Just how many service numbers could the outstation at Appleby use?
The pointlessness of it came to me when I started work on Teesside, where United services were in the 200s. Answering the enquiry line (remember those?), I would say that 75% of people asked what time the 58 went, not the 258. It made eminent sense to drop the surplus 200 while making sure that you did not duplicate the same number along the same roads.
There have been outbreaks of the opposite silliness. Service 1s with multiple termini and significant variations en route; multiple X1s departing within a few feet of each other; network renumberings ignoring another operator using the same number in the same place, all of which is undesirable. Sense and pragmatism are needed, as with anything else.
Transport for London is the master of preserving routes and service numbers. Woe betide any proposal to change tradition – it has been doing that since 1927! But places alter and so does demand. There were also bus operators large and small that did not bother with service numbers for years.
But back to the original question. What value is in a number? Is there revenue risk from changing it? Or do people not care that much?
