numbers, along with alphabetical suffixes to denote branch routes. In 1924, under the London Traffic Act, the Metropolitan Police was authorised to allocate route numbers, which all buses had to carry. This ultimately led to chaos, and in the London Passenger Transport Act 1933 the power to allocate route numbers was taken away from the police and handed once again to professional busmen. Suffixes were gradually abolished over the decades, the last such route in London being the 77A, which became the 87 in June 2006. The LPTB, under Lord Ashfield, assumed responsibility for all bus services in the London Passenger Transport Area, an area with a radius of about 30 miles from Central London. This included the London General country buses (later to be London Transport's green buses), Green Line Coaches and the services of several Tilling Group and independent companies. London buses continued to operate under the London Transport name from 1933 to 2000, although the political management of transport services changed several times. The LPTB oversaw transport from 1933 to 1947, when it was nationalised and became the London Transport Executive (1948 to 1962). The responsible authority for London Transport was then successively the London Transport Board (1963 to 1969), the Greater London Council (1970 to 1984) and London Regional Transport (1984 to 2000). However, in 1969, a new law transferred the green country services, outside the area of the Greater London Council, to the recently formed National Bus Company. Trading under the name London Country, the green buses and Green Line Coaches became the responsibility of a new NBC subsidiary, London Country Bus Services, on 1 January 1970. Despite a comprehensive replacement of the bus fleet in the early 1950s, bus ridership fell dramatically - from 4.5 billion in 1950, to 3.1 billion by 1962 - while private car ownership rapidly increased. A seven day strike in 1958 and a fall in London's population by over a million people exacerbated the fall in ridership. A former network of express buses operated by London Transport in Central London was the Red Arrows. The routes, all numbered in the 500s, ran from main line stations to various locations in the West End and City. They were introduced in 1966 and expanded in 1968, but in the 1990s they were gradually phased out and only two former routes, 507 and 521, remain. In 1974, Jill Viner became the first