OK, OK, so you thought the big news is Ray Lewis. You were wrong, buses are much more interesting:
A leading investment bank, Deutsche Bank, warned that the Routemaster revival would come at a price. Passengers would have to stomach an 11% increase in fares because the estimated annual cost of running the network, already subsidised at £500m a year by the taxpayer, would rise by £117.8m, mainly due to the hiring of around 3,000 extra staff to man the Routemasters.
3000 people would be 1000-1500 neo-Routemasters, depending how intensively you used them. This is a ‘bus for London’, not just a bendy replacement, after all. An 11% rise is from 90p to £1, or, for your current Income Support discount user, a modest 122% price rise thanks to Boris, although fortunately this won’t kick in until 2012 onwards, when heaven knows what the price of oil will be.
Elsewhere, Peter ‘Help Me I’m Trapped’ Hendy lets one slip:
He said the last bendy bus would be taken off London’s roads in 2015, when the contract for the 435 from Marylebone to Lewisham expired.
453 actually, Peter, along with the 436. 2015 is when they’d expire if TfL extended them by the usual two years good contract reward, so evidently he’s expecting them to be well run up to 2013 as bendies. Boris Watch executive summary - bendy bus contracts will be extended during the next Mayoral term, says TfL Commissioner.
The article also quotes Stephen Glaister as a ‘former board member at Transport for London’, confirming what we said here, that Boris heaved him over the side in his bonfire of anyone on the TfL Board who wasn’t a Tory or businessman. He’s just a well-respected academic specialing in transport policy and transport economics, particularly in London, so obviously he had to go. He might point out something unfortunate, mightn’t he?
One final thought - Boris is keen on consultations; he’s promised to have one on the Western Extension of the Congestion Charge, after all. So where’s the consultation on bendy bus withdrawal? Naturally, as with the Western Extension it would have to be those affected, those who actually *use* the buses. I think another email to TfL and the Mayor’s Office would be in order here, if only to find whether democracy is considered a rare and precious thing for car drivers in Kensington rather than bus users in Clapton.
10 responses so far ↓
This is especially bad considering that Boris’s ‘alternative scheme’ for replacing half-price fares was…to keep prices low.
We should create a Bus dossier, I feel.
This really is policy making by fantasists. I haven’t written about it yet because of all the Ray Lewis shenanigans, but the Routemaster competition launch on Friday was unbelievable. Every time any question came up that was even remotely technical (like how many buses will you build) and Boris just passed it straight over to Hendy. Hendy for his own part did the best that he could with what he was forced to do, but for most of the questions there just weren’t any real answers that he could give, because the whole thing is just completely bonkers. At one point Dave Hill asked about the fact that most bus manufacturer have said that they won’t touch this, and Hendy replied (and I shit you not here) that they may have to get racing car and/or Aerospace designers to step in instead. They didn’t actually say that they have called NASA, but I’m sure it’s an option on the list.
It’s possible, of course, that the entirety of Boris’s campaign became so overwhelmed with public relations - Lynton/Crosby etc. - that such policies were never given serious consideration.
That may work if one only promises ambiguous reforms regarding ‘waste’ and ‘bureaucracy’, but it certainly won’t with issues such as transport.
[...] have no wish to distract you again from Tom’s superb post on the problems of the Routemaster, but this little nugget is worth extracting from the [...]
I do hope some aerospace company comes in - I’ll start banging on about San Francisco’s BART system, which was a revolutionary leap forward in public transport provision using space age aerospace technology. It was also expensive, unreliable and didn’t do remotely what it was supposed to do…
Boris is showing a worrying predilection for magic solutions, which invariably go pear shaped or turn out not to be quite what the salesman was claiming.
On that note, he’s considering the possibility of building a cable car over that Thames. The Times seems to be convinced, but I’m going to reserve judgement until further details are released.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4276498.ece
Where are those monorails we were promised in Look & Learn?
Pardon my question, but isn’t Deutsche Bank a major stock holder in and fund raiser for a bus manufacturer of bendys? Couldn’t their counsel be a trifle biased? Or must we believe everything tending to ridicule Boris? Not that this isn’t a long shot. Just that we need to see if bus makers actually boycott the competition. Not so sure that will happen.
Tom, I think you’re spot on with the point about a lack of consultation here. I’ll write to the Mayor about this as an interested Londoner; others reading this, please do so too as it does seem hypocritical to make a big thing of consulting on the Congestion Charge but not consult on something affecting an even larger area of the capital (and, I’d guess, more people).
“Not so sure that will happen.”
I’m not either, after all we can expect anyone bidding to put in a price which ensures their own profit,. however obscene it looks to us. In a related concept, the DfT is doing a similarly stupid procurement for the next generation of inter-city express trains, which has already lost one bidder (Alstom) who decided there was more profit elsewhere. There are two bidders left though, and if anything that project is dafter than neo-RM.
“Couldn’t their counsel be a trifle biased?”
No more so than Gilligan and the Policy Exchange goons currently running it, I should think. There are lots of bendy manufacturers and there’s a globalised investment market, so I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if DB had a financial interest (nor if DB turned out to finance a bus leasing house, either, which could arguably benefit from neo-RM).
Actually, I’ve just looked it up and DB Equity own 0.02% of Daimler AG, the parent company of EvoBus which makes Mercedes Buses, worth $9.2m. Not sure that’s a significant contributor to DB’s wealth, really, they’re worth over a billion Euros. Also, they held 4.35% last year, so are actually getting out of the stock - if their comments on buses are meant to boost their shareholding they’re going about it a damned odd way by selling first.