“Everyone who has sweltered in a tube train stuck between stations, who has endured aggressive behaviour on the top deck of a bus, who has been gridlocked in London traffic, or who has dodged death while cycling through the streets, knows that there are serious problems with London transport.

Getting from A to B is a daily struggle for many who live in this city, whether they live in zone 1 or zone 6.

A Mayor exists to solve these problems, but not enough has been done. While we now have greater spending on transport, the money is not always invested wisely. For every pound we spend on fares, too much is spent on running costs – and too little on investment in the technology and infrastructure that will improve transport in the future.

A first-class city needs a first-class transport network. We must take urgent action to get London moving:

Our buses have improved, but there is more we can do. Londoners must see more police on the buses, especially in outer London.
The tube needs to be rescued from the ruins of Gordon Brown’s finance deal, so that vital upgrades that were promised actually happen.
The Congestion Charge must be reformed. We must re-invest more revenue in improving our roads, as well as in schemes to encourage walking and cycling. And for every £8 fee, less should be spent on administration.
We must also encourage Londoners to give up their cars by making public transport more affordable and reliable. Cycling must be made easier and safer.
We must end the lack of investment in London’s overstretched, unaffordable and overcrowded rail services. A Londoner in Richmond on the minimum wage will have to work two hours just cover the cost of their daily Travelcard. This has to change.
The Freedom Pass will be protected as an untouchable right for London pensioners.”

This is at the core of my objection (apart from me not finding modern buses particularly horrible, and the ridership figures tend to suggest I’m not alone) – the people behind it were also behind the deliberate destruction of the concept of public service as a progressive force and the idea that good design was the right of every citizen. Of course they destroyed it – it was socialistic and therefore belonged to Swedish airports and such like, and why should the bloated public sector interfere in private transactions between private companies? Much the same thing happened in housing, of course, under both parties (Thatcher’s lot changed the rules on room size, IIRC), which makes Boris’s apparent interest in a ‘New House For London’ interesting, since the same objections apply. I’d love to see high standards of design and interior space given to council tenants as a right as part of a large-scale public housing programme, of course, but that’s why I’m not a Tory nor ever likely to be.

Modern buses are designed around the needs of privatised bus companies, not users – it’s a competitive market, and the operator is the customer whose opinion matters. This means they’re reasonably comfortable but crucially cheap to operate and easy to maintain (this explains the weight issue, by the way – you could build them like aircraft but it would push your maintenance costs up above the competition). The criteria for modern bus design therefore differs sharply from that pertaining in the 1950s, where a lot of work went into the passenger environment but it was assumed as a design parameter that you’d always have plentiful labour for crewing and maintenance.

It’s a kind of cargo cult mentality to think you can just magic a bus into thin air by sketching out how it should look, without putting in place the social and political infrastructure required for the original. Then again, Conservatives are ideologically forbidden from any proper understanding of systems or networks.

Of course, it’s not actually Conservatives who are pushing the policy, it’s the culture warriors of Policy Exchange and associated Radical Nostalgists, but that doesn’t let Boris off the hook.

It’s noticeable that other media outlets not plugged into the whole Standard-Boris axis constantly combine the two, and talking to people I’d say about 90% of them immediately conflate the two when the subject comes up. I find it hard to understand how this can be accidental.

However, this will cause amusement when people find out that the new 38 isn’t that nice shiny bus they saw in the paper last year, but, er, looks like all the other buses.

Sorry, should have said single door *boarding*. The 507 and 521 will be dual door boarding, which gives about the same amount of door width per stop (and exactly the same fare evasion problem, which is none on those routes). The 38 will be board-at-the-front-pay-driver (or mostly swipe Oyster these days), get off in the middle. The difficulty comes if there are stops with a lot of uneven flows, where 90%+ of the movements are boarding, say. The 507/521 are obviously the best example of this, which is why they’re so suitable for bendies. I’m not sure if the 38 has stops with those characteristics, but if it does it might be worth watching on Day Zero.

The point I was making is that that type of bus is new to the 38, so in that sense we’re not going *back* to how it was before Ken ruined things, or whatever, we’re actually trying something entirely new, with Boris written all over it. I expect numbers travelling will be down by then, though, and some people will be put off travelling free, but not very many. It’s the stairs I’m interested in, since the effect of introducing the new buses is to move a lot of the capacity upstairs, where people will have to use it.

Would be utterly amazed if they were doing this in London. It would destroy any semblance of respectable journey times.

Is some cad at TfL trying to prove to Boris that a single rear door on the Borismaster is impractical and won’t work?