Boris Watch

Much fun in the tiny part of the world that thinks the whole bendy bus/Routemaster thing matters.  Read on if discussion of wheelbases and lower saloon capacities floats your boat, otherwise I recommend reading practically anything else written anywhere ever, up to and including phone directories and home improvement books.

Still with us?  Good.  Over at Dave Hill’s new place the longest comment thread so far is on the latest Routemaster competition news, driven largely by two CiF commenters, kennite and newsed1 (I appear on the thread as ‘Input’, by the way).  I suppose in a way this shows the depth of passions stirred up by the great bus wars still exists to an extent which would probably amaze the archetypal man on the Clapham bendy bus.  Commenter kennite is particularly concerned with capacity:

New double-deckers actually have 72 seats, four FEWER than in the most commonly used version of the old Routemaster, the RML. (The “small” version of the Routemaster had 68 seats.)

New double deckers do have room for fractionally more standees - 12, compared with 5 on the old RM. But the real difference is that the seating capacity downstairs, where most people want to sit, is far, far fewer on a modern decker. Some modern deckers in service in London today have as few as eight accessible seats downstairs (the remainder, in the rear section of the lower deck, are up a step.) Modern buses may be better for wheelchair users than the old RM, but they are inferior for the other 99.999 per cent of passengers.

I’ve been pondering this, and I think he’s talking rubbish.

• Point 1 - the RML was a minority of the total fleet (about 20%).  The vast majority of the thousands of Routemasters were 64 seater RMs, 27.5 ft long.  RMLs are 72 seaters, 30ft long.  Not sure where kennite gets the extra four seats from or the idea that RMLs were the more common variant.
• Point 2 - the RML has *all* its lower deck seats up a step from the rear platform, which is why they’re fundamentally inaccessible to wheelchairs.  Modern double deckers with a low floor section therefore have *more* accessible not-up-a-step seats than the old RML, something like the Enviro 400 Boris and co. took out to Beijing has at least 19 and possibly more (the manufacturer actually claims only the last row is up a step).
• Point 3 - if having the most accessible seats where people want to sit matters, you want a bendy bus, period.  All the seats are downstairs and there are more of them than in any other design available.
• Point 4 - You can go out now and buy a modern double decker with 75 seats, which is more than the RML ever had, and can hold more standing passengers to boot.  I’d have thought you’d want *at least* that from your new Routemaster, given the huge demand for buses in London now - in fact given the extra cost you’d want to beat it.  Hold this thought, also the fact that the modern double decker somehow requires 35ft length by 104 inches wide - the RML is 30ft*96 inches.

The core of Dave’s piece is this section, which gives concrete shape around the proposed bus procurement:

Yet the detail of this timescale also shows just how ambitious it is. The statement explained that the design competition’s winners would be announced in late October or early November and their efforts then made available to bus manufacturers as part of the competitive tendering process. The aim is to award contracts in “late 2009″ which will give the bus-maker, “two and a half years to design and deliver the new buses by mid-2012.”

2012 is of course Olympic year, so with the first being delivered in time for the Olympics it all fits together nicely - indeed Capoco call their concept [PDF] ‘the Routemaster for the 2012 Olympics’, making the rather big assumption that one bus counts and there’s no slippage on such a radical design.  However, 2012 is already a key date in TfL’s procurement timetable - all buses entering service after then are supposed to be hybrids, which effectively means the new RM has to be unlike existing buses available off the shelf in both configuration and propulsion.  As an engineer I don’t like the sound of this - the best designs proceed by evolution, not revolution, which is why TfL’s small hybrid procurement so far has been basically a conventional bus with a smaller engine and some batteries.  This is sensible - you get a small number of buses not vastly different in design to current ones (so they can be operated in public service), test them for a bit, then do the maths around speed, energy consumption, reliability, maintenance costs etc.  Since technology gets smaller, cheaper and more efficient over time, you’ve not thrown your money away on a Betamax-on-wheels and can take things forward with some decent ground rules and experience to draw on.

What’s being proposed for Boris’s bus is that we effectively put all our eggs in his revolutionary basket and if, come 2012, it doesn’t work, what then?  Throw more money at it?  There’s no incremental build up of expertise - a bus builder wins a contract this year, goes away and gets on with it, then delivers a bus in 2012.  Would we get a demonstrator based on existing technology to build up the mileage?  The original RM took *years* to get right.

This brings us to the second commentator on Dave’s thread - newsed1.  It’s rapidly obvious from a quick scan through his CiF postings that the gentleman considers himself a cut above the average Guardian reader, constantly parading his northern working class comprehensive educated credentials and sneering at the Islington media elite the voices in his head tell him constitute the Guardian’s readership.  Tiresome, boring and serious old hat, this is purely inverse snobbery with a chip butty on each shoulder for perfect weight distribution.

However, he’s also proud of his part in ridding the world of Ken Livingstone, hinting that he supplied stories to the Times (who are something of a clearing house for getting crap transport ideas to Boris) and advice to the new Mayor.  What on earth on?  A bit of digging tells us - he’s the guy who commissioned the original new Routemaster concept for Autocar.  In fact, he’s Autocar’s associate editor, Hilton Holloway

[The proof is rather long-winded, but in short he commutes from Battersea to Teddington (where Autocar's office is), his eBay account records an interest in Leyland (including a recent purchase of a Leyland Olympian badge), which coincidentally is where Hilton Holloway comes from, on CiF he recalls his schooldays at tedious length, which allows us to work out his date of birth as around 1967, which fits with Holloway's picture and biography.  He also has a letter in the Times on Routemaster replacement costs which indicates a degree of familiarity].

So this leaves us with a conundrum - why is a self-confessed working class Thatcherite, doubtless politically moulded by the Winter of Discontent and the early Thatcher years, a petrolhead who writes for a motoring magazine and welcomed Boris’s election as a victory for the motorist and whose only interest in buses seems to be related to his home town of Leyland think we should take him seriously when he proposes a massive publicly subsidised bus procurement exercise?  Not very Thatcherite, as we’ve said before.  We’re entitled to know where and why this Damascene conversion occured and how genuine it is.

I don’t know, frankly, but the profile fits with a lot of the other ‘New Routemaster’ groupies, whose dedication to getting rid of the tiresome Mr. Livingstone always seemed rather stronger than their lifelong devotion to state investment in quality public service.  Dean Godson for one, Andrew Gilligan for another.  Boris Johnson for a third (although I think we can safely say by now that anyone assuming that what Boris wrote before he became Mayor actually reflected his real political views is a bit naive).  Even Guido Fawkes got in on the act, and we know that he hates public transport so much he’d rather drive home drunk with no insurance.  Amazing, really, that so many people with ties to right-wing disinformation merchants and with views on road transport taken from Mr. Toad should come out with the same stuff about the same bus at the same time for the same reason.

The only two theories I have are that he really wants to get rid of the congestion charge, which means returning the bus network to the traffic-clogged pre-2000 state which means open platforms, and that by harping on about bus pollution we somehow conveniently forget all those gas-guzzlers pointlessly pumping out fumes on the school run.  What never actually comes out is any indication that the bus traveller’s willingness to pay extra for this petrolhead utopia may be open to question, or that by reducing the capacity of the system you might actually annoy people who’ve got used to bus travel.

Holloway evidently thinks that the RMXL design he commissioned from Capoco (founded by a former Leyland Bus employee, in one of those odd coincidences) is basically the one Boris will pick, with hybrid power rather than hydrogen.  I’m not so sure.  For a start there’s the capacity.  Remember above that our original RM is 64 seats, the RML is 72, the Enviro 400 is 75.  Autocar’s diagram claims the RMXL as having 92 seats with two wheelchairs, which is clearly ridiculous and not borne out by the diagram, which shows a modest 28 seats downstairs plus a wheelchair space, and 48 upstairs, for a total 76.  Suddenly the ‘new RM’ with its expensive and lengthy gestation and higher operating costs looks poor value compared to what’s already on the market.  The figures for the Enviro 400, for instance, are 31 downstairs (28 with a wheelchair) and 47 upstairs, which comparing like-with-like is 75 seats.  In other words, the whole expensive boondoggle that won’t be available for four years has the one more seat than a bog standard not particularly ground-breaking double decker of 2008, and that seat is upstairs.

Let’s go back to the dimensions.  The Capoco plan is apparently 9840mm/32.3ft, which is enough for 13 rows of seats on the top deck, the same as the Enviro, so you’ll get a bit less legroom upstairs.  Downstairs we have a very low floor, but we have to put a battery pack in there somewhere, the suggestion seemingly being under the seats ahead of the rear axle, which strikes me as potentially rather uncomfortable - batteries are rather heavy and unless we know what volume we need to move the thing reliably we can’t really judge how this will affect legroom.  There are relatively simple calculations involving acceleration, weight and charge density, but remember on this bus the batteries are the sole motive power - the low floor precludes any use of the engine for mechanical power.  Therefore using very crude modelling, taking the Prius with 45kg of batteries as a basis, we have a lightweight 12,500kg bus to move fully loaded which is about 10 times the Prius, so you’ll need about 450kg of batteries, which by some shaky maths is about 200,000 cubic centimetres.  That’s a box a metre square and 10cm deep, one installed each side of the bus.  Obviously the stop/start nature of bus operations impacts how much battery you provide, it would be even better if we could regenerate power back from braking into the battery.  I suspect the battery might get a bit hot, too, and there’s a safety aspect to consider when you put something hot, electric and full of chemicals in the passenger compartment.  Of course, this applies to all hybrids.

The width is nearly the same, 2550mm against 2650mm, both much wider than the old RM, which reflects the increasing width of the British arse, a vital and often overlooked measurement in modern vehicle design.  The reason RMs feel cramped is because the average Briton really is rather bigger than in 1955, not because there’s anything wrong with the design.  It would, however, be rather stupid to use 1950s measurements for a new bus, hence it’s going to be bigger all round.

So far the RMXL looks like a contender, but the killer is the wheelbase, which affects the maneouvrability.  Frankly the mock up looks ungainly and wrong, and engineering that looks wrong often is.  The wheelbase, dictated by the extra length and side door positioning is 6540mm against 5950 for an Enviro 400 and 5791 for an RML, and that was considered long for London’s roads in the 1960s.  It’s also way longer than the Citaro G’s two wheelbases of 5840 and 5990mm, so presumably would look even more ungainly turning into Shaftesbury Avenue on the 38.

Finally there’s the Achilles heel of the whole design - the operating costs.  You’ve got to have a conductor - the design of the front entrance precludes the driver from having direct access to the passenger flow, the rear entrance presumably requires a crew member in attendance.  With the job being boring (no tickets to sell) and uncomfortable (gale blowing in), the wages you pay won’t attract the right staff unless you pay over the odds, in which case you’re massively increasing operating costs - wages are by far the largest component of running a bus service with just the driver, let alone two crew.  It’s a seriously bad idea.

That’s not to say the design is totally useless - if we can take the basic design principles, ditch the Routemaster configuration, get the wheelbase under 6 metres, run it driver-only but keep the lightweight space frame, low floor, hybrid drive and small charging engine we’ll definitely have a proper 21st century bus for London.  We’ll also have something very like Ken Livingstone (and Isabel Dedring’s) hybrid was evolving, in about the same timescale, having come full circle.  Given that, the competition looks like an unnecessary delay of about six months on an already tight timescale where a few months slack might be just the ticket around, say, December 2011.  No, I’m not convinced, can you tell?

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