page_title: Crawley
section_title: Bus and Fastway
hierarchical_section_title: Crawley / Transport / Bus and Fastway
caption_attribution_description: English: Metrobus double-decker bus number 495 (YN54 AJV), a Scania N94 OmniDekka, in Crawley, West Sussex, England. This bus company has a depot in Crawley and operates almost all the town's local and long-distance services. Taken at the bus station in Friary Way in the town centre.
context_page_description: Crawley is a large town and borough in West Sussex, England. It is 28 miles south of London, 18 miles north of Brighton and Hove, and 32 miles north-east of the county town of Chichester. Crawley covers an area of 17.36 square miles and had a population of 106,597 at the time of the 2011 Census.
  The area has been inhabited since the Stone Age, and was a centre of ironworking in Roman times. Crawley developed slowly as a market town from the 13th century, serving the surrounding villages in the Weald. Its location on the main road from London to Brighton brought passing trade, which encouraged the development of coaching inns. A rail link to London opened in 1841.
  Gatwick Airport, nowadays one of Britain's busiest international airports, opened on the edge of the town in the 1940s, encouraging commercial and industrial growth. After the Second World War, the British Government planned to move large numbers of people and jobs out of London and into new towns around South East England. The New Towns Act 1946 designated Crawley as the site of one of these.
context_section_description: Crawley was one of several towns where the boundaries of Southdown Motor Services and London Transport bus services met. In 1958 the companies reached an agreement which allowed them both to provide services in all parts of the town. When the National Bus Company was formed in 1969, its London Country Bus Services subsidiary took responsibility for many routes, including Green Line Coaches cross-London services which operated to distant destinations such as Watford, Luton and Amersham. A coach station was opened by Southdown in 1931 on the A23 at County Oak, near Lowfield Heath: it was a regular stopping point for express coaches between London and towns on the Sussex coast. This traffic started to serve Gatwick when the airport began to grow, however.  When the National Bus Company was broken up, local services were provided by the new South West division of London Country Bus Services, which later became part of the Arriva group. Metrobus acquired these routes from Arriva in March 2001, and is now Crawley's main operator. It provides local services between the neighbourhoods and town centre, and longer-distance routes to Horsham, Redhill, Tunbridge Wells, Worthing and Brighton.
  In September 2003 a guided bus service, Fastway, began operating between Bewbush and Gatwick Airport. A second route, from Broadfield to the Langshott area of Horley, north of Gatwick Airport, was added on 27 August 2005.
caption: A Metrobus double-decker bus at Crawley bus station
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