Boris Watch

73 bendy bus in Oxford Street

Back to bendies, and a thought that occurred to me when trying to wargame the expected results of Boris’s first real people-affecting policy test.  The 38 bus is obviously going to be replaced, probably next November, by bog-standard double deckers with most of the seats upstairs and a single wheelchair/buggy space, just like any other.  They’ll be replacing bendy buses with all the seats downstairs and large amounts of circulating space around the middle and rear doors, which I believe are quite popular.  As an example,  I recently saw two ladies loading pushchairs into the rear door of a 207 at the roomy new built-for-bendies Shepherd’s Bush bus stop.

So, I hear no one ask, what does Boris’s policy mean for the less mobile and those with buggy-age children?  Well, on the face of it, the increased number of buses should make practically no difference - TfL are at pains to point out that the overall capacity remains the same, doesn’t it?  There are even far more seats available overall.  Well, it’s not quite as simple as that, since the extra seats will be upstairs, where people riding for short distances, people with shopping, the physically disabled, those with children in buggies or the plain old and infirm won’t use them.  For them, it’s downstairs where the action will be.

Let’s crunch the numbers.  I’m assuming here that we have double-deckers with 31 seats downstairs (which is the figure for a 2-door LWB Enviro 400, if anyone’s counting) against 49-seat bendies.  Likewise we move from two wheelchair/buggy spaces on bendies to one on the double deckers, a space being the large circulating areas by the doors, whether or not there’s a wheelchair in it.

Peak AM:

• 20 bendies become 28 double deckers, an increase of 40%
• Spaces go from 40 to 28, down 30%
• Downstairs seats go from 980 to 868, down 11%

Peak PM:

• 18 bendies become 25 double deckers, an increase of 39%
• Spaces go from 36 to 25, down 31%
• Downstairs seats go from 882 to 775, down 11%

Weekday off-peak:

• 15 bendies become 18 double deckers, an increase of 20%
• Spaces go from 30 to 18, down 40%
• Downstairs seats go from 735 to 558, down 24%

Saturday:

• 15 bendies become 18 double deckers, an increase of 20%
• Spaces go from 30 to 18, down 40%
• Downstairs seats go from 735 to 558, down 24%

Sunday:

• 10 bendies become 12 double deckers, an increase of 20%
• Spaces go from 20 to 12, down 40%
• Downstairs seats go from 490 to 371, down 24%

Overall then, Boris’s plans for the 38 reduce the capacity available without going upstairs by between 11% and 25%, with most of the reduction coming off-peak and at weekends.  This will exacerbate the problems caused by the switch to single door operation, since the staircase will inevitably be more heavily used in both directions.  Also, as Tory Troll discovered yesterday, London Travelwatch have been examining staircase design:

Descending a straight staircase is different. When standing at the top, the passenger looks down on a long open space which offers an unbroken fall if the bus lurches or brakes suddenly.  Even for the most able bodied, this is psychologically disturbing, causes most users to hesitate as they descend (thus slowing the unloading of the bus) and is particularly difficult for those who are carrying bags and therefore have only one hand free to hold the handrail.

I’ll hazard that the slow down in loading on the 38 will be more than expected, therefore, despite the frequency increase.  That means bunching and turning short (the latter is already a 38 speciality, I understand).

Of course, with Boris firmly stuck on the top deck of the gum tree with his head in the sand, we won’t see any action taken on this until after November this year, when whatever will happen will happen.  It’s already clear from the figures above that debendifying the 38 will hit those least able to get around.  Policy Exchange will be delighted.  Let’s refresh our memory of their bizarre 2005 report:  First, Simon Jenkins, who blames Europe:

A combination of health-and-safety dirigisme, the disabled lobby and heavy salesmanship from big European bus companies  has inflicted on Londoners a sequence of poorly performing and claustrophobic buses, including the new single-decker bendies.

Then the neo-con’s friend Dean Godson, who blames the unions:

The proponents of group rights referred to here are, of course, the representatives of the disability lobby.What an ascendancy they enjoy
within many of our public services! When writing an article on the Routemaster for The Times (21 July,2005 – see the Appendix) I asked the Transport and General Workers’Union whether it would back the retention of the bus. The answer, astonishingly, was no. Although hundreds of TGWU members – specifically, conductors – had already lost their jobs and many more were destined to do so with the advent of a 100% single-manned bus fleet,the union nonetheless believes that the interests of the workers must yield pride of place to the disability lobby’s singular reading of the concept of disabled rights.

It never ceases to amaze how stupid and ignorant that whole report is - why is a right-winger from a Conservative think-tank castigating a union for *not* advocating pointless job creation?  Quite an artefact of its manly, red-meat Republican, pre-credit-crunch, reality-is-what-we-say-it-is time, so it is.  While we should never forget that the whole bendy/RM issue was made up out of thin air by right-wing propagandists, bear in mind that it’s rare that their ideas get translated so directly into domestic reality* without being stopped, and for that matter we’ll be watching the matter closely.

* Internationally it normally reaches reality when dropped from 20,000 feet over some Arabs, of course.

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