How many prototypes would you make if you were creating a bespoke vehicle? The London Transport Routemaster (absolutely no relation to the New Bus For London) was developed after four different prototypes were created by three different manufacturers. Boris Johnson’s vanity vehicle, however, will now see nine (up from eight) identical prototypes created, all [...]

It’s quite possible that Boris’s own re-election team’s private polling was already aware of the flagging in the polls that’s been causing waves today, as the last few weeks have seen a blizzard of new initiatives above and beyond those (*cough* bus *cough*) long scheduled to provide a suitable featherbed of PR ops in the [...]

The first prototype of Boris Johnson’s bespoke New Bus For London (cost of eight prototypes, £7.8m, despite the Mayor having misled Londoners into believing the manufacturer would bear the costs of development) has been doing the rounds of ten London boroughs for the past few weeks, appearing on static display and accompanied by [...]

New Year’s Eve again, how did that happen? Still, it’s the eve of London’s Olympic Year so the Mayor will surely be in the greatest city on Earth to watch his £1,900,000-worth of fireworks, won’t he? No, it seems he has better things to do. What ho, bound to see a few [...]

Trafalgar Square, 16 December. It’s currently hiding in Ash Grove Bus Garage, Hackney.

Well, he’s got the hair and now it looks as though he’ll be getting the clown bicycle to go with it – parp, parp! Cole Coachworks Ltd of Barnet (a company only in existence for five months) have been commissioned to design and build a promotional bicycle for Boris Johnson’s Mayoral election campaign.

Johnson’s projected [...]

Having raked over the dead past a bit, let’s see how Lord Foster’s fresh ideas pan out against the usual checklist of Thames Estuary Airport talking points:

Birdstrikes – since ‘seabirds’ are actually shorebirds the further out the better. Foster’s site is right on the shoreline and explicitly goes out of its way to [...]

Reading through the rather sparse minutes of the Thames Estuary Steering Group, one notes that Kit Malthouse, who opened proceedings at the first meeting and attended the second and third, was absent from the fourth and final one.  One also notes that Daniel Moylan was sent down to Kent this week to explain [...]

The advent of a new Secretary of State for Transport in the form of Putney’s tube-using Justine Greening seems to have triggered off another estuarine tsunami of nonsense, mostly in the usual paywalled Sunday Times, saying MUST HAVE AIRPORT NOW OR ELSE DEATH MURDER RECESSION FAMINE DEATH DID WE MENTION DEATH WAAAAAHH. Or words to [...]