Boris Watch

Here’s what the Evening Standard said about Boris’ mayoral campaign:

Boris Johnson has vowed that his first act as Mayor of London will be to scrap bendy buses and replace them with a modern-day Routemaster.

Here’s what Boris’ mayoral campaign actually said about buses:

“We should on day one, act one, scene one, hold a competition to get rid of the bendy bus.”

Here’s the subsequent correction to the Evening Standard article:

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Here’s what TfL and the Official Journal of the European Union (where public sector tenders invariably get announced) have to say on the subject of bendy-bus removal or Routemaster competitions:

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Here’s what Boris Johnson’s Mayoral priorities for bus fleets says:

Phasing out bendy buses
The Mayor believes bendy buses are not suitable for London’s roads, and was elected on a clear mandate to scrap them. This process will take time, as it requires waiting for contracts to expire and negotiating new agreements for different types of bus.
Competition to design 21st century Routemaster
The Mayor recognises this will be a lengthy process, and has asked TfL to start setting up the competition.

Here’s what Boris Johnson says these days:

There are two elements to this, of course: phasing out the artic - the bendy bus - over time and then we’re going to be launching a competition to design a new generation Routemaster bus

There is an argument about… whether you can take them all off the streets at one… swoop, or whether you need to phase them out… and what I said throughout the campaign was that you could… because you do need, the fact is, at peak times, you need a volume carrier of some kind.

So, to sum up:

There’s only ever one mention of a timescale in this story, and it was 2nd May 2008, which is over a month ago.  Nothing’s happened.  There are still nearly 400 bendy buses on the streets, no timetable for phasing them out has been announced (not even someone going through and finding the first contract up for renewal), no costs have been announced, no negotiations with the leasing companies about termination charges or redeployment of expensive, unwanted assets.  Also, with talk of an ‘argument’ over instant withdrawal he’s now apparently at cross-purposes to his official list of transport priorities, which clearly says that they’ll be phased out.  With whom is this argument being had, then?  Himself?

On the plus side, Boris appears to have met someone who knows something about transport and listened to at least some of their advice.  Hopefully it was Peter Hendy, who knows exactly why London has bendy buses; it’s because lots of Londoners want to travel around.  There’s nothing new in this, in the 60s there were high-capacity single deckers on routes in central London and one theory of a possible resolution of the bendy/RM issue is a replacement of bendies with modern high-capacity single deckers as the contracts expire.  With nothing official to go on other than Boris’ ever-mystifying TV and press conference appearances it’s hard reading the runes on this one.

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