Author: Mulder Digital

Superloop SL6

Following my fairly pleasant experience on the SL5 last week, I decided to try out the SL6 this morning. I knew that the SL6 used to be the X68 and that it was one of the two express routes incorporated into the Superloop and that it runs from Croydon to the West End in the morning and returns in the afternoon. Yesterday I checked the schedules and also noted that the last departure from West Croydon bus station was at 08:30.

I checked London Bus Pal this morning around 07:45 and noticed that the next departure for the SL6 wasn’t showing, so I was already a bit concerned. I decided to take the second-to-last departure at 08:12, just in case the 08:30 doesn’t show. This is already concerning for the route – since it’s a low-frequency service, you want to be sure that the bus actually turns up.

From West Croydon

I arrived at West Croydon around 08:05 and stop B1 wasn’t very busy at all, only a few people were waiting. Shortly afterwards, I noticed that the bus (EE11) was turning in from Wellesley Road and I snapped a few pictures.

EE11 arriving at West Croydon with tram 2557 next to it

We boarded promptly, and I overheard a staff member saying to the driver that he was glad she turned up, as he hadn’t seen another SL6 for over 30 minutes. The driver just confirmed that this was her second “shift” for the day (looking at London Bus Pal, I could see that the bus also served the first departure of the day at 05:50, so I assume that’s the one she did). We set off a minute early at 08:11 and it only took us around 10 minutes to get to Crystal Palace. The bus was relatively empty when I boarded at West Croydon; however, I didn’t manage to get one of the front top seats (of the very few people who were waiting before me, they grabbed those seats first).

Even though I saw that there were a LOT of stops until we got to the express section which started from West Norwood – and it had me concerned that the ride would be painful, it seemed relatively quick and we were flying past several stops. There were a few timing stops in between, but it wasn’t much of a problem.

Once we got to Crystal Palace however, this changed a bit, and the bus stopped more frequently to pick up more and more passengers. There were some beautiful and breathtaking views of London from the top of Beulah Hill, but I couldn’t really take a picture quick enough. By the time we got to the West Norwood, the bus was relatively full with passengers having to sit next to others 😱!

Going express!

We arrived at the final stop before the start of the express section (Norwood Road / Robson Road) at 08:46 and we set off at 08:47 (this was two minutes earlier than timetabled).

This part of the journey was fairly uneventful, except that by the time we passed Brixton Station at 08:59, I started really regretting having 3 coffees this morning. I checked the timetable and it was another 26 minutes before the next stop – I was mostly just working and doing some other research at this time.

Final arrival

At 09:14, we were at Waterloo Station, but due to traffic and traffic lights, it wasn’t until 09:20 when I could get off (6 minutes earlier that timetabled and I was glad about it).

All in all, my experience was very different to my previous Superloop journey. The bus was super modern, comfortable and clean (it’s a double decker ADL Enviro 400 Electric Vehicle and even has some sun roofs).

Conclusion

If I were to improve this route, I would:

Stop less frequency between West Croydon and West Norwood: this should allow the service to run a bit quicker (journey times wouldn’t really be impacted much for people at the intermediate stops as the bus stopped so frequently any way – just catch a “local” to the next express stop and join from there).
Run all day: most people didn’t really seem to be office workers – if you aren’t going to be in London until 15:40, you would need to take a train or much slower local bus service to get back. It also seemed quite wasteful that a few SL6 branded buses were returning empty to Croydon. TfL could collect more fares by also running in service for the returns (and maybe just a few more during the day in both directions).
Include a stop at Brixton Station: this would make it a viable and quick way into Central London and you can connect to pretty much anywhere since the Victoria line runs very frequently. I understand this would make the bus much more full, but isn’t this the point?

None of the stops were announced and I don’t know if this is because the driver didn’t sign in or if it is normal for the SL6. I wouldn’t really want to find out as it’s a long and arduous journey and it can be done much quicker using alternatives.

Some other useful information

The route is operated by Arriva London and 16 different buses have been used on this route in the last 7 days (12 of them appear to be branded for this route specifically). At average, there were between 3 and 5 buses out on the route at any one time. This is a weekday only service with buses heading from West Croydon to Russell Square in the mornings between 05:50 and 08:30 and then returning to Croydon between 15:40 and 18:50.

Tags Bus, SL6, superloop

London Bus Pal

Superloop SL5

Today I want to try something different and tell you about my experience on my first ever journey on the Superloop (I have taken the X26 before, but it wasn’t called the Superloop then). Please note that all of the information in here refers to my journey on 3 April 2025 and some things might have changed by the time you read this, London Bus Pal should always give you the latest information.

The purpose of my journey was two-fold: I wanted to see what the Superloop was about for myself, but also test London Bus Pal as I used to before to see where the gaps are. I have come home with a ton of improvements that I want to implement that I am sure would make a huge difference!

Journey 1: Croydon to Bromley North Station

Around 12:40 today, I arrived at Croydon Library bus stop with the next SL5 service to Bromley North Station being just 2 minutes away. The bus was a single-decker ADL Enviro 200 diesel bus (ENX14) and it left central Croydon with around a quarter of the seats still available. The first stop was East Croydon station and from here all the seats were taken with a few people standing for the journey.

After East Croydon, more people seemed to get on at Shirley Library and then we passed a really interesting looking McDonalds which is in an old pub building. It used to be called the Shirley Poppy and was one of the two most interesting things I saw on the journey. (I couldn’t take a picture of it, you’ll have to Google this one!)

After this, we continued through suburbia until we reached Bromley and then there was another really interesting building which caught my eye: St Mark’s Square. It’s a very unique and eye-catching building.

The very distinct St Mark’s Square building

At the second-to-last stop (Elmfield Road / the Mall), most people seemed to have gotten off. I understood why this was when I got off at Bromley North Station, as there wasn’t much around and I headed back to the High Street.

All in all, I found it a pleasant and quick journey. The bus wasn’t super crowded, the traffic was light and we got from central Croydon to Bromley North in about 38 minutes.

About Bromley

I haven’t ever been to Bromley, but I found it to be a very pleasant area. Now that I have tried the SL5 route, I would seriously consider going to Bromley as an alternative to heading into Central London. Just on Monday I had to go and collect something from the Apple Store in Regent Street – I noticed that I could also collect from Bromley, but didn’t think it would be so easy to get to.

I was also very surprised to see that Bromley has an Ocean Basket! Ocean Basket is actually a South African restaurant chain which was started in my hometown of Pretoria. It was one of the highlights of my recent trip to South Africa and I am very glad to know that there is one that is easily reachable for me.

Unlike Croydon which in my opinion has really been suffering a lot with a lot of shop closures, patchy regeneration efforts and loads of derelict buildings, Bromley seemed vibrant and busy with loads of shops for everyone. I really liked Bromley.

None of these buildings have tenants and Whitgift Centre is virtually empty

Another empty building in Croydon – Nestlé left in 2012

(After taking some photos, I realised I was slightly harsh against Croydon – it actually also has a lot going for it – take Box Park for example, but there are also areas where the buildings are just standing completely empty!)

Journey 2: Bromley South to East Croydon Station

After spending a little bit of time exploring Bromley, I looked at the quickest way back to Croydon and the only real option was to take the SL5 bus again (all the other options would take over an hour!). I walked to Bromley South Station bus stop at around 14:10. This time, the bus stop was buzzing, mostly with school children. The bus arrived 3 minutes later and it was a push to get on – the same type of single decker as before, this one was ENX13. London buses have always struck me as fairly unique as it doesn’t matter whether you arrived at the bus stop first or last, when the bus arrives, you just get on as quickly as you possibly can.

Despite there clearly being way more passengers than seats, one kid actually tried to save both seats for himself by putting his leg on the seat next to him and when someone suggested he makes space so that someone can sit next to him, he just said “I’m not sitting next to her” and got up and decided to stand for the journey instead. I don’t understand this behaviour at all – how on earth did he think he was going to get away with having both seats when people were already shoving down the aisle.

We got on our way with nobody getting on or off at the next stop and only one person getting off at The Chinese Garage. I then noticed a sign for a school and I started dreading what was about to happen. When we pulled up to Langley Park School, the bus stop was buzzing again with lots of school children wanting to get on. Everyone still managed to get on, even though it was standing room only and I definitely noticed that these school children were much better behaved than the ones who got on in Bromley. I love just observing people and seeing their behaviour.

The rest of the ride was hot and uncomfortable. At one point I could see the Crystal Palace Transmitting Station in the distance and we passed the interesting McDonalds again. I actually suspected that most people would get off at East Croydon station, but by the time I got off, the bus was still quite full, although there weren’t as many people left standing when it headed off to the last stop in Croydon. It was just too hot on the bus and I was glad to be off it. I thought it was just because I was over-dressed, but as soon as we got off, I overheard someone else saying “the heat on that bus was so bad” – so it wasn’t just me. The total journey time on the way back was 26 minutes (starting from Bromley South station and getting off at East Croydon station).

Conclusion

All in all, I really like the Superloop (well, at least SL5) and how it connects Bromley and Croydon. It was a pretty quick journey that would take over an hour to achieve any other way. I will be using it again, but I would definitely avoid the school rush hours – I am just too old for that.

Some facts

At peak times, there are 10 buses which run on this route and it has 11 stops in each direction. There are a total of 12 buses which are used on this route and have the Superloop 5 branding. The total distance by road is 12.5km / 7.8 miles and the stops are on average spaced 1.1km / 0.7 miles apart.

The first buses depart each end at 5am and the last bus departs at 00:30 every day and during the day, buses depart every 11-13 minutes with a reduced frequency on Sundays only. The scheduled off-peak journey time is 32 minutes towards Bromley and 30 minutes towards Croydon.

Tags Bus, Public transport, route review, sl5, superloop

London Bus Pal

I am back!

Well, I wasn’t really ever gone to be honest, but I think it’s about time for an update of where I am.

My last post in 2020 was about adding functionality for bus enthusiasts and looking back and remembering where we were then, I feel proud of what I achieved with this functionality. Last year, I did an interview with Riku Fryderyk and it’s well worth a watch if you haven’t yet. Be sure to also check out the rest of their Youtube channel for some great videos related to transport.

The interview was done while I was in Bangkok as I went travelling for six months. We learn a lot from travelling and definitely a big lesson for me was how difficult it really is to work and travel at the same time. Firstly, there’s a balance to be found in between sitting down and working and going out and exploring new things. I found it hard to achieve this balance, because there’s a huge world to explore and only limited time. Then we layer on the time zone differences (I went from GMT +7 all the way to GMT -3), internet and connectivity in different countries, a laptop that was on the brink and constantly running out of space and the pressure of packing and unpacking, figuring out how to get to the next airport or just where to get your next meal. This is all to say that I really haven’t put as much effort into London Bus Pal as I could have, but I have no regrets either as I managed to really experience a lot in this time and from a personal point of view, I really needed a break.

In all of this time, I have had a few volunteers who have helped out with the app to allow me to focus on development work where I had the time. A huge shoutout and thanks to ThatWestLondonBusGuy, VT, c1taro and hdg for really keeping everything going.

I just arrived back in London a week ago and I have already done a ton of groundwork to continue the next chapter of London Bus Pal. There’s a lot of improvements coming and I am grateful that I can be back in this great city and use my own app again. I am energised, motivated and ready to go. The list of improvements is long, so please be patient as I slowly work through everything. I’m very confident that the London Bus Pal of six months from now will be a great improvement on what we have already today.

I will write some updates here from time to time (in fact, I’m literally going to write another post as soon as I post this one, so look out for it).

Tags london bus pal

Development London Bus Pal

Summer update for London Bus Pal

Post author By Mulder Digital
Post date 15/08/2020
3 Comments on Summer update for London Bus Pal

The last time I gave any update on development for London Bus Pal was before the global pandemic became a thing in the UK. Things looked up at the time and I didn’t realise what an impact the pandemic would have!

New record!

Daily usage of the app was on an ongoing upward trend. As probably every other Friday before, on the 6th of March, I hit a new record of the number of users who were using my app. It hasn’t been surpassed since, and two weeks later, when lockdown was announced, usage had dropped by 50%. And a week later, usage dropped by another 50% from the week before (or 75% of our record day!).

Usage has slowly crept back up since April, with each week hitting a new record over the previous week (since lockdown started), but we’re still a while away from our previous record. Friday, 14 August, another record is still 32% below our pre-lockdown record. But it’s increasing rapidly and that’s good!

Please stay safe

Don’t take from my comments in the previous paragraph that I think it’s necessarily good for buses to become more crowded, this is not my wish. Please stay safe and do what it takes to stay safe.

What am I working on?

I think the core of the app is good and working. Every now and again I get a bee in my bonnet to rewrite some of it, but it works, so I should leave it alone!

I’m working on a range of add-on functionality which is mainly suited for bus enthusiasts. I already have the bus information screen where you can get all kinds of details about the bus you are travelling on. There is some basic details about which routes the bus has been operated on during the last 7 days.

I’m currently working on making it easier to track which buses you have seen before. I would say think about it as a bus journal, but I’m actually doing both – you can tag a bus as “seen” and you can add some details into a journal which you can then review later on.

With tracking all of the information about buses and routes, it is also quite easy to get out data about buses running on routes they don’t usually run on. The most difficult challenge for me is to find a way to fit it into the app without bloating it.

Sticking to my roots

When I created London Bus Pal all those years ago, the idea was to keep things simple. I didn’t want to over-complicate things and keep it easy to use for everyone. This hasn’t changed, so it’s quite challenges to keep things the way they were, but also add useful functionality without crowding out screens.

Equally, another thing I’ve always believed in, was to keep ads as unobtrusive as possible. It’s always been a small banner at the bottom of the screen, unless you donate some money and then it gets removed.

Why do I mention these things? Because things will inevitably change, but I won’t forget what’s important. On the main screens (anything with prediction data), I will still keep to only showing banner ads; but for any of the extra functionality (bus information, user-generated content and so on), I might become a little bit more aggressive with advertising or ask for some form of subscription to help fund this. There’s a good reason for it:

It costs money to keep the app going

The basic functionality (predictions) is there, it is stable and the costs are fairly small (generally covered by the banner ads). The more sophisticated functionality costs a bit more in terms of money and time investment, so I will try to make sure that I at least cover costs of what it takes to keep the lights on. So please, if you start seeing subscriptions and some full-screen ads, I promise you that it is not because I am trying to milk the app for all the money I can, but just a way that I can keep funding all of the infrastructure needed for whatever you are using.

That’s all for now, I’ve just taken a bit of a break from working on the “seen” functionality – back to some coding for me!

London Bus Pal

London Bus Pal v20.8.3

Thank you so much to all who have given me positive feedback. I am actively working in the background on some awesome features. In the meantime, some small changes:

Stops with no letter indicators will no longer show a blank roundel 🔴
Fixed a bug where the board would not update if there a no more buses due at the stop (and the last bus would stay stuck) 🚌
Fixed the way that one-way routes work (“H2 towards Golders Green Station” instead of “H2 between Golders Green Station and “. ➡️

Tags release notes

London Bus Pal

London Bus Pal v20.8.2

Some small tweaks to the look and feel for screen to make everything fit 🐘
Changed the wording of “approaching” to “due” for buses 📝
A few small fixes where things would get “stuck” as loading and never complete ⌛
A fix for version 20.8.1 where stops with no buses due would break the app 🔥 (sorry!!!)
In the settings, you can change the colour scheme away from the default red (blue and purple) – I actually really like the blue! 🌈

Tags release notes

London Bus Pal

London Bus Pal v20.7.3

Several changes in this release: •

Updated the home screen so buttons fit better on the screen 🏠
Moved the bus to show “additional bus info” to be a floating button ℹ️
You now have the ability to send suggestions for updates to bus data 📝
Ads should no longer interfere with the menu 📵
Fixed a bug where an error would appear if you go into the “remove ads” screen multiple times 🐛
Fixed a bug where you could not view the details of buses which are not in service ⛔

Tags release notes

London Bus Pal

London Bus Pal v20.7.2

You can now back up your favourites and other settings to the cloud and restore it on another device (requires sign in through the settings menu) 💾 (this is not yet automated!)
Fixed an issue where you could only pay me once to remove ads (you should now be able to do this multiple times) 💰

Tags release notes

London Bus Pal

London Bus Pal v20.7.1

Fixed an issue where the time would not show fully on all devices if using the “Toggle countdown” functionality ⏰
Updated the journey planner to use a more modern map style 🗺️
For speed and efficiency, made the download file even smaller 🗜️
Fixed a small typo in the GDPR consent screen (it was showing \n instead of starting a new paragraph) 📑
Removed support for Android 4 🍫

I have made the decision to remove support for Android 4 altogether. I used to keep a really old version of the app around (from 2018) for older versions of Android, but it has become nearly impossible to support, even in the new app framework. It is not easy to find test devices and many users would give bad ratings for the app when it was unfortunately the really old software causing the issues, rather than my app.