James Ford is a columnist for City AM and was an adviser to former Mayor of London Boris Johnson on transport policy
Sadiq Khan’s dad was a bus driver. We know this because he tells us so a lot. It has not quite risen to the level of irritation that Keir Starmer got to with his ‘son of a toolmaker’ schtick (actually, his dad owned a toolmaking business…but ‘son of small business owner’ lands rather differently, especially with a Labour audience). Sadiq’s dad definitely didn’t own the bus company (he drove a bus on route 44 between Victoria and Tooting) so it is marginally less galling than Keir’s prolier-than-thou fake history.
Interestingly, the number 44 is good prism to take stock off the London bus network after a decade of Sadiq Khan at City Hall. For example, every day an average of 44 buses crashed in the capital in 2025. That is a staggering rise of 20 per cent on the number of crashes in 2019. Coincidentally, 44 is the number of degrees that cabin temperatures rose to during the recent heatwaves, sparking strikes by bus drivers across the capital. I don’t know about you but crashing buses and bus drivers being cooked alive are not a great advert for a bus network in rude health.
We know which route Sadiq’s dad drove because the mayor recently reminisced in The Observer about his happy childhood riding around on his dad’s bus. If people want evidence of how dangerously out of touch with the real-world experience of users of London’s ailing bus network the mayor is, then this interview is it. The mayor makes the bold claim that “buses are back in fashion.” Not in London they aren’t. Ridership across the capital’s buses fell by a whopping 70 million journeys during 2025 alone. If that is “back in fashion”, I’d hate to see out of fashion. Compared with pre-pandemic levels, bus usage is down by 20 per cent in London. Moreover, this passenger crisis has severe financial implications. The amount that TfL has to spend to subsidise the bus network to compensate for a shortfall at the farebox has almost doubled from £659m in 2016/17 to an eye-watering £1.19 billion in 2026. TfL has already made cuts to 40 routes and further cuts are in the pipeline.
The mayor also boasted to The Observer about the “success of our efforts to build Europe’s largest fleet of zero-emissions buses”. Yet TfL has actually abandoned plans to make London’s entire bus fleet electric by 2030 as it originally intended. Currently, with less than four years until that 2030 deadline, barely one-third of the capital’s bus fleet are electric.
The Observer article reveals a mayor that is very much drinking his own Kool-aid when it comes to the capital’s buses. We should not be surprised. It is probably a long time since the mayor boarded a bus to make a journey rather than for a photo opportunity. This, after all, is a mayor who prefers to be chauffeured around London in an armoured Range Rover.
No doubt Sadiq Khan would want to point to his two flagship bus policies – the Hopper fare and the Superloop – as evidence in his defence. But neither initiative is the unalloyed success he would want to make them out to be. Far from it.
The Hopper fare – by which passengers can change buses within an hour without paying a second fare – is certainly popular. In 2024 City Hall bragged that more than a billion people have taken advantage of this cunning cost saver since it was introduced in 2016. But, of course, that means that TfL has missed out on well over a billion bus fares worth of income. (Which, at current rates, equates to £1,750,000,000 in lost revenue). That would be enough to pay the mayor’s exorbitant salary for more than 10,000 years. Or pay for the DLR extension to Thamesmead outright. (I will leave readers to make up their own mind which they think offers better value for money).
The Superloop – a network of express bus routes – has had a more mixed public response. An early TfL report into the Superloop network’s performance concluded that four of the nine initial routes were “not meeting minimum performance standards.” In many cases, rather than a shiny new bus network, many of the Superloop routes are just rebranded older routes (such as the SL11, which is just the old 472 with a new number and fewer stops) operating an ageing fleet of past-their-prime buses. Other routes, like the BL1 (or the ‘Bakerloop’) that mirrors the proposed Bakerloo line extension, are just crude replacements for new tube lines that the mayor should be building but has failed to make progress on. For that latest route to launch – the SL12 – TfL has even been compelled to offer fare-free travel for the first week to try and get people onboard.
Passenger numbers vary considerably between the various Superloop routes. Six of the Superloop routes have fewer than 10,000 passengers a day. Compared to the 1.86bn bus journeys made in the capital in 2023/24, the Superloop makes up only a tiny fraction of the total. Whilst passenger numbers on SL6 (between Heathrow and West Croydon) have grown by 91 per cent, the frequency of buses on the route have doubled – suggesting that there are now fewer passengers per bus using the route. By comparison, passenger numbers on SL9 (between Harrow and Heathrow) have grown by just two per cent.
Whilst the best used Superloop route (SL8) has around 25,000 passengers a day, this is a net increase of just one per cent when the increased number of buses on the route and the loss of passengers from slower, parallel bus routes are considered. This would suggest that much of the ‘growth’ in passenger numbers on the Superloop comes at the expense of other bus routes rather than attracting new customers overall or reducing journeys made via other modes of transport. A new network that effectively cannibalises passengers from the rest of the bus network will do little to boost TfL’s fares income (or offset the estimated £1.14 million that was spent on creating the Superloop brand or even the £13,000 spent on rebranding a single bus for the launch).
London’s fleet of red buses are iconic. Like black taxis, Beefeaters, and red post boxes they are a globally recognised shorthand for the capital. And, for better or worse, Mayors of London come to be defined by their flagship bus initiatives. Ken Livingstone had the ill-fated bendy bus. Boris had the Boris Bus. Sadly, these initiatives, whilst well-intentioned, are usually characterised by ignominious failure, controversy or at the very least a contested reputation. Sadiq has not just failed to introduce a signature bus of his own. He has been content to tinker with fares gimmicks and rebranded routes. And, as a result, we find that his lack of ambition has translated into a declining network, falling ridership and millions of pounds wasted. I doubt Sadiq Khan’s dad would be proud of what the mayor has done to the capital’s bus network during a decade of misrule.