Boris Watch

Highly encouraging development, since it means I can be lazy this month – London Reconnections is examining the Mayoral Answers for December, which must therefore presumably be out.

A happy Christmas to all of our readers. May it be sweet, merry and wholly unironic.
We’ll leave you with a rather touching video of Boris lighting the Menorah at the Chanukah celebrations in Trafalgar Square…
[youtube]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=UuI1N0Chdc8[/youtube]

Notorious dieselhead Captain Deltic has fired a warning shot in the direction of Boris, Peter Hendy and TfL over the Routemaster policy:

It’s always fatal to give engineers too much time. Britain’s best train ever, the iconic IC125 was conceived by engineers who saw an urgent commercial requirement for a next generation high speed train and [...]

Two more articles – first Pro London cover the matter here, while Andrew Gilligan displays his big worry – that his arch-nemesis Peter Hendy and his evil Ken-worshipping coven will undermine Boris’s wonderful Routemaster with their sordid attempts to run London’s transport professionally for its users:

I know your game, Mr Hendy
Ominous, little-noticed words from the [...]

We occasionally like to go back and revisit old posts, and there’s an opportunity here to put some facts around the bendy replacement timetable, particularly the PVR increase and the stated 2011 date for the Routemaster.  I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that 31/12/2011 counts here, as two years [...]

Bus and Coach is a magazine.  They have a website.  The website has a story about the Routemaster competition.  Here’s a sample:
Perhaps we should be thankful that his nostalgia trip only took him back to the 1950s, and we’re not seeing the re-invention of the eco-friendly low-pollution horse bus.
You can read the rest here.  No, [...]

Remember the early Boris/Kulveer decision to keep Parliament Square as an inaccessible traffic island (or, as Boris put it, a ‘green glade of heroes’)?  Building Design website has an interesting article about the guy behind the scheme, that’s well worth reading, particularly for this bit which confirms what we thought at the time:
Transport for London [...]

The Evening Standard have added a small image of side and top elevations of the Aston-Martin/Fosters RM design, which gives us the opportunity to do some guesswork at dimensions.  Blowing it up on my screen, it’s about 222mm by 57mm, which, allowing for imperfect measurements, is a length 3.75-3.95 times the width.  Now, the width [...]

Here.  Apparently pulled by CiF yesterday, heaven knows why.  Anyway it’s back and exciting the Bendy Jihadis.  Links to Boriswatch, for which much thanks.

I’ve long been intrigued by the LondonUnlocked.org website, which describes itself as:
[A]n independent organisation dedicated to finding transport solutions for the Capital.
Neither tied, funded, nor affiliated with political parties or industry, we wish to build a broad, grassroots consensus on the direction of transport in London. We want to see a London which works better, [...]