Ooh, London Connections linked to us. Welcome, I’m a long time fan.
Anyway, in the long-running saga of bendy bus routes and contracts, the uk.transport.london newsgroup has turned its giant collective transport fact-collecting braindump on the subject and has some corrections for me. Their distilled wisdom appears to be:
25 and 73 have been extended from 2009 to 2011 (I’d love to know when this was done, incidentally). This leaves 12, 38, 507 and 521 as the routes possibly stopping being bendy next year, only the 12 and 38 of which aren’t going to cause colossal problems - the 521 in particular runs every *three* minutes in the peak from Waterloo through the City, out to London Bridge and return. Possibly that’s the one that isn’t going to go double-decker.
People don’t like going upstairs on double-deckers (fear of crime? pointless on short journeys?) so the result will be crush loading downstairs.
Using new untried vehicles in large number risks high costs and potential unreliability.
Bendy use on routes 436 and 453 will extend to 2015 if the two year good performance extensions are awarded.
If they try and force single-entry buses on any of the really high-capacity routes expiring next year they’re going to come a cropper - the public who have to use them will be outraged and clamouring for the bendies back. A childish part of me wants them to try and fail, but the grown-up part wants them to see sense and not inconvenience a large number of people. What’s for sure, if they do it, we here at Boris Watch will make sure people know that the Conservative’s favourite think tank Policy Exchange and Andrew Gilligan are responsible.
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10 responses so far ↓
You’re quite correct - people just won’t go upstairs on double-deckers, even when the lower floor’s full to bursting - they like to crowd around the entrance and exit doors and impede the flow of passengers or stand in the disabled/buggy space so people obliged to use those conveyances can’t get on or off, either.
I surely can’t be the only one who thinks the best seat on a bus is upstairs offside front. Where else can you pretend to drive?
Tush! The best seat’s the one right at the back, upstairs on a Routemaster where you can have a fag, carve your name on the back of the seat and unscrew the lightbulbs and chuck them out of the window - at least, that’s what we used to do after school 30 years ago when children were all polite and well-behaved…
Nowadays they just hijack buses and drive them to Cuba.
Excellent posts, Tom.
Tut, Helen - wait till Ray Lewis gets his hands on you…
I’m with Wireman on the offside front idea, but my son (a lout of four summers) is firmly convinced that running up and down the top deck is the only way to travel.
For short journeys on busy buses I’ll stand downstairs. No point fussing about.
Nobody goes upstairs, this is why bendies are much better, Often people don’t even go to the back,
I hope they don’t cut the capacity of the 12, I love that bus, frequent all night and you can even manage to _just_ squeeze on in a morning.
Boris’ demographic don’t actually use buses of couse - routemasters fit with beafeaters in a nationalist nostalgia trip for the bits of middle England who live in outer London. If they actually had to get buses on the daily basis they’d want the best buses possible.
“Boris’ demographic don’t actually use buses of couse -”
I think this is possibly the weirdest part of the whole thing - Boris is not proposing doing nothing to help the bus-using population of inner london (which would be understandable), he’s actually proposing to use taxpayers money to make their journeys to work more difficult. That’s bizarre. It could be that he actually thinks people will prefer being off those nasty bendies, after all that’s what he’d think in their position. The possibility that the alternative might be *worse* has clearly got no place in his thinking.
Of course, due to the unique way TfL is funded, the cost bears on the UK taxpayer as a whole and the London farepayer, there really isn’t a lot of London tax money in the budget.
I can’t stand the upper levels either. You never know who you might find - http://executive.cfbranch.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/imgp3065.jpg
I reckon that was the first time Boris’d ever been on a bus.
Got to keep the 521 bendy, it shifts an enormous number of well upholstered commuters from Waterloo to Holborn in just a minute or so. Would be great if one of the Waterloo - Euston routes up Southampton Row and the 243 were also bendified.
They are daft in the middle of the West End though!