Jonathan Glancey, taking over from Dave Hill as the official Voice of the Routemaster in the Guardian, displays a certain naive enthusiasm – he’s a transport romantic who’s usually worth reading, but on this case he misses the bus.
Most of all, the RM2 must be a London bus. London is one of the richest cities in the world, supposedly one of the most creative, and together we must find a way to commission a bus that, one day, will be as famous and as respected as the original Routemaster
Gah – no, we mustn’t, we must find a way to act globally to reduce CO2 emissions and car use, which means value for money, not bespoke blue sky thinking. Boring, I know, but there you go. No room for romanticism in hardcore environmental engineering, as we’ve said before – it’s all numbers. Producing city-specific buses is just getting your priorities severely arse about face. Daft.
Note the comments – the CiF faithful usually throw up Ken-hating oddballs in threads about the RM, but not on this occasion:
- ‘As a cyclist, I’m dreading any attempt to reintroduce a bus with an open rear platform’
- ‘They’re not seriously suggesting that anyone makes such an ugly-ass thing? Are they?’
- ‘The competition is indeed a joke’
- ‘ It looks like a double-decker hearse.’
- ‘Why is TfL even considering entries from art & design students rather than transport engineers?’
- ‘Horryfyingly, this isnt a joke. It is the product not only of our foremost School of Design, but also of our shiny new mayor and his tenuous grip on the real world that the rest of us inhabit.’
- ‘a regressive (dare I say reactionary?) step fuelled by nothing other than a dreamy-eyed nostalgia for a bus that was not only uncomfortable but let the wind and rain in’
- ‘I can’t understand why Bojo has such hard-on for Routemaster buses. It’s just… totally ridiculous’
- ‘It’s an extended Reliant Robin isn’t it?’
- ‘This is all rubbish!’
Finally, at comment 18, we get an alternative view:
- ‘Boo to all the tedious naysayers who’ve left disparaging comments.’
Well, that told ‘em. After that it’s back to the nay-sayers, however.
As for what I think, people are still concentrating on the frills not the engineering, things like glass roofs are obviously expensive, pointless, top heavy and risk overheating in summer (which is why many current London buses are painted white on top, an elegant, inexpensive and cunning solution). Video screens – some buses have them already, linked to the CCTV so you can watch yourself pick your nose – I do wonder if this is in some ways more effective and better value for money than mass monitoring of buses as announced yesterday. Monitoring every bus all the time would cost a fortune in manpower and be practically impossible, so, as Roger Evans says in the comments to Dave’s post, the kit would only actually be used in emergency situations, which isn’t quite the official spiel. Sit upstairs and idly rip the seats up while rolling a joint and no one will watch you – you might, however, get caught by the excellent BusTag scheme which has been running for a while, where CCTV footage is viewed after low-level crime is detected, the perpetrator’s boat races put in the papers and often arrested. I do hope that scheme is given the resources it needs.
A serious article would focus on the important bits – the weight, drive train, precise degree of electric power (no way is it a full electric vehicle with current technology), seating/standing capacity, wheelchair access, circulation, running costs and who is actually on the panel. We know car-mad Kulveer is on it, which doesn’t inspire confidence, but I’m not aware of the identity of the rest of the judges. Glancey neatly avoids all this to tell us, for the nth time and with the usual lack of evidence, that London needs a ‘London bus’ and traditional buses were wonderful. I can get that shit from Andrew Gilligan and the bendy jihad ultras, Jonathan, now write about something new and exciting.
Oh and for light relief that smug Thatcherite petrolhead Hilton Holloway crops up in the comments to boast about his inside knowledge of all this. Prat.
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“‘a regressive (dare I say reactionary?) step fuelled by nothing other than a dreamy-eyed nostalgia for a bus that was not only uncomfortable but let the wind and rain in’” – too right, Routemasters were absolutely bloody freezing in the winter.
The full RM panel:
Peter Hendy – Transport Commissioner – TfL
David Brown – Managing Director, Surface Transport – TfL
Clare Kavanagh – Performance Director, London Buses – TfL
Mike Weston – Operations Director, London Buses – TfL
Kulveer Ranger – Director for Transport Policy – GLA
David Quainton – Independent judging panel member with relevant experience in vehicle design and manufacturing
Luckily we’ve abolished winter, so that won’t be a problem.
There is something rather wonderful about getting on a warm bus from a freezing wet street, though. Now who’s sounding like a transport romantic?
I hardly ever used RMs while they were in service, only the 94 ran them round here in my time, and that stopped in 2004.
Cheers Adam. The welcome inclusion of David Brown forces me to repost this letter from him, published in the Times on Christmas Eve last year:
“Sir, Your welcome for a new Routemaster bus (“Blueprint for ‘son of Routemaster’,” Dec 19) does not report the true cost to Londoners. Reintroducing open platform buses would require conductors on all routes, as they would be required to safely manage access. This would cost £600 million – raising this money would require a huge fare rise for London’s six million daily bus passengers. The single fare would have to rise from 90p to at least £1.50 and the weekly pass from £13 to at least £21.
Open platform buses mean more passenger deaths. The passenger fatality rate on Routemasters is more than double that of other London buses. ”
I wonder how on earth they managed to swing it to stuff the panel with competent professionals? Oh, and Kulveer Ranger.
Clare Kavanagh spoke at this year’s Capital Woman conference, for that matter:
http://www.london.gov.uk/capitalwoman/event/speakers/kavanagh-c.jsp
Given that, we may get a happy ending, defined as a nice prize for the winner followed by a hefty kicking into the long grass, with the best engineering ideas taken forward by WrightBus or whoever and incorporated into a proper economical green hybrid bus for mass introduction in 2012, as would have happened anyway.
Ah, David Brown of London Town. He’s great, I met him at a transport seminar at the CapitalWoman conference a couple of years ago.
David Quainton – Independent judging panel member with relevant experience in vehicle design and manufacturing.
Former director of Alexander Dennis.
Newsed1 claims two havn’t been leaked to the press. He is the press. I am sure the good looking one is a revamped version of the Capoco/Autocar design that has been modified to conform with the strict competition specification. Which will feature in a forthcoming issue.
Sorry Helen I meant to put those descriptions in quotation marks. They’re lifted from MQT answers. I cannot vouch for Quainton.
Sory again, I meant Ewan, not Helen *chews fist and smacks head*
“Former director of Alexander Dennis.”
Former Sales and marketing director, in fact, until 2005.
http://www.busandcoach.com/newsstory.aspx?id=251
He described the Enviro400, which is the bog-standard 2008 double decker I use for comparison and hardly the most luxurious travelling environment (my Mum’s local bus route in Birmingham, the 50, uses them, so I got to sample a few last weekend) as:
‘…a clever idea wrapped in a gorgeous design – the ultimate double-decker.’
I much prefer our local Scanias, frankly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Scania_OmniDekka_447a.jpg
Mind you, I like the sound of these:
http://www.busandcoach.com/newsstory.aspx?id=2131
Interesting that the live CCTV was pioneered by the US Military. Just how far will PX go to militarise buses??
I usually enjoy reading Glancey, but this time he just didn’t seem to be properly clued-up about the subject. Does London really need a “bus for London”? It needed the RT and the RM because there were no other buses that were tough enough for London’s traffic conditions. It needed to keep the RM in the 1980s (when Livingstone kept it and Cutler would have got rid of it) because there still weren’t any buses that were tough enough, and because conductors were still needed (before travelcards and Oyster and bus-lanes). But do we need a “bus for London” in 2008?