I REFER to the letter from J. Lee of Pokfulam (South China Morning Post, April 20), which concerned two bus routes arriving at a bus-stop in Wan Chai at the same time. Whilst both routes 40 and 504 run between Wan Chai Ferry and Wah Fu, they serve substantially different areas in between and hence, have different journey times. The routes have different levels of demand and this results in different frequencies between the routes at various times of the day. The scheduled frequencies of these routes, at that time of day, are every 10 minutes for route 40 and every 15 minutes for route 504.
On some parallel routes, where journey times and frequencies permit, we do co-ordinate the timetables to permit alternate departures on each route. However, where there are substantial differences in the operating characteristics of the routes, this is not possible.
There are other reasons why such co-ordination is difficult to achieve in practice. On the day in question, a bus on route 40 left Wan Chai Ferry Pier at 12.55 pm, having arrived there some two minutes earlier. That particular bus should have arrived Wan Chai at 12.15 pm and left again at 12.25 pm to return to Wah Fu. However because of the cumulative effects of the morning's traffic congestion, the driver was already running late before leaving Wah Fu for Wan Chai. Add to this the fact that the trip took 48 minutes, as opposed to the scheduled journey time of 30 minutes, and any hopes of co-ordination are immediately lost.
Conversely, on route 504, no delays occurred at all during the course of the day and the advertised timetable was fully maintained. Schedules are constantly reviewed in order to take account of the regular delays to services whilst on a more immediate level, regulators will adjust the frequency of services to take account of unforeseen circumstances. It must, however, be understood that whilst the buses themselves can run all day without a break, the same does not apply to the drivers. All drivers have at least one break period during their working day in order to allow them to take a rest from driving.
In addition to this allowances are made within the schedules for shorter periods of recovery at terminals. During this period, if the service is operating to schedule, drivers will often leave their bus to await their scheduled departure time.
The fact that drivers are ''enjoying a lengthy chat at the terminus'' does not therefore reflect badly on CMB.
