please empty your brain below

Yeah - great news - especially the bit about the teenage girls with their feet on the seats. (Perhaps Boris would also like to do something about the playing of music on mobile phones as well.)

dg writes: Ah yes, I forgot to mention mobiles, let me add an extra feature, thanks.

Wot, no anti-steaming windows? We've been waiting half a century for them.

There's now a real winner.
Or rather two winners.

Boris is starting a 'Conductor Recruiting Campaign' in the City next week..

I've heard that out-of-work Fund Managers are quite quick with figures and therefore it isn't expected that they'll have problems with the waybills..

The back of the Capoco one is great; I hate the front. It's like that nasty Renault's back.

Actually, I think I menan the other one. The pictures in the early reports are rather confusing.

egad, they're all hideous... I suppose there's only so many ways you can design a double decker bus...

These carry half the number of people of a bendy, and with twice as many staff. Hurrah for quadrupled staff costs and doubled emissions!

Can we have a proper mayor back now please?

Well said, DG, for a vanity project it certainly is. Good to see Boris delivering on all the headline grabbing parts of his manifesto, while the ever increasing TfL budget deficit is swept under the carpet. Let's keep increasing costs and traffic on the road while simultaneously decreasing TfL revenue. What a brilliant wheeze!!

Should I be attempting to garner sufficient enthusiasm to care less either way? Sorry; I suspect I'm having a moment of outrage fatigue, whether it’s done ironically or not.

Errr, pardon me, but where are the rear view mirrors supposed to go on those hideous curved fronts?

yak yak yak. A bus engineer needs to design the bus not a flaming artdefect.

Boris said "I know that, like me, Londoners will be waiting eagerly to see how these ideas evolve into the final design that will appear on our roads."

Or, in other words, although he's just doled out £50000 in prize money to the two winners, the end result may end up bearing little resemblance to either.

"The first prototype of the new bus will be on the streets of London by 2011."

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/corpor...next-
steps.aspx


Let's see, they haven't picked a final design, they have no plans, no engineering team, no manufacturer and they will have a working prototype on the streets in THIRTY-SIX MONTHS? Wow! These guys must be good.

"The first prototype (oh, the redundancy, thought Boris knew his Latin, is that a clue?) of the new bus will be on the streets of London by 2011". So, an election pledge substantiated.

Doesn't say it'll move though, does it?

Or even Greek (P of P). The redundancy stands, though.

Oh Blinkin eck!

Why oh why did I follow your link into the rightwing hell that is our "local" paper.

Am seething indignantly now.

The busses look crap too IMHO.

Any hooooo, Happy Christmas all!

CF

Bugger me, those winning designs both look pig ugly.

Well, if we can't have our beloved old Routemasters back, then I suppose these will have to do. In fact, I quite like the designs: they certainly look far better than the London 2012 Olympic logo.

"their" goes?

dg writes: unforgivable, sorry, changed now.

Lego bus wins my vote, hands down, brilliant. That child should get an award.

I like the new designs, and frankly am keeping fingers crossed we can get an open-deck design back on London's streets.

This isn't about nostalgia or some oompah-weren't-things-better-in't-50s type nonsense (although there's nothing wrong with tradition and recognising unique icons that make a city different). It's about the practicalities of trying to get the 9 or the 14 down Piccadilly almost any time of day, or down Earl's Court Road, or towards Hammersmith Broadway.

Being stuck in traffic for 45 minutes, with the bus stop in sight, and bus driver refusing to open the doors, is what puts most people I know off using the bus instead of hopping on the tube even when, in theory, the bus is more direct and could be quicker.

My 2p!

Cheers
Carlbob

@carlbob Have you ever asked yourself why the driver won't let you off? I imagine because he's afraid of litigation if something happens to you..

I suppose you also approve of people walking along railway tracks and in tunnels if the trains are not running..

In the 1970s, I worked for a while as a LT conductor and I know what it's like when someone is dragged along by a bus.. because instinct says 'don't let go' or what people look like if they fall head first off the platform of a bus.. and I've had many hours of anguish, waiting to find out if someone would accuse me of being at fault.. Which I wasn't.

No, the general public are usually idiots in such situations and it's best not to have buses with open platforms.. and just a thought, would you like to see people riding on the rooves of trains again (Indian style), I mean it's so easy to jump off at a tree close to home..

ROFL. There's no similar campaign to re-introduce slam door rolling stock, of course, in fact the new trains coming in next year (which Boris will probably claim are his) look very like bendy buses inside - not many seats and wide articulated gangways.

There's a place near me where buses often get stuck (the alleviation scheme is held up by local NIMBYs). The driver normally lets people off before the stop if he can see the lights are going to stay red for a bit (and this is out in the sticks where we won't get Boris's Boondoggle anyway). In any case, the best solution to buses getting stuck in traffic is to remove the cars, not hack expensive holes in the buses, as this benefits all the people who *aren't* getting off at the next stop as well.

IsarSteve - it always rather amazes me that we're supposed to think of the poor bendy-grated cyclists but not the poor falling-off-the-back-of-a-Routemaster victims, who shall be sacrificed to bring about the end of Health-n-Safety-Gorn-Mad. Different kinds of dead person, then.

Fair enough responses. I guess I never felt in any way endangered when getting on/off a Routemaster in between stops.

I'm not sure that comparing a cyclist trapped by a bendy bus through no fault of his/her own, and someone recklessly jumping off a moving Routemaster is a valid comparison, mind you.

@Carlbob - the whole point is that the stories of cyclists injured by bendy buses over and above buses in general were completely apocryphal - i.e. made up. Bendy buses are no more injurious to cyclists than any other bus on London's streets right now.

@JoeOrder - not disputing that. I'm not anti-Bendy, just pro-platform!

Irrispective of views on the platform point, I do think an exercise in designing a bus for the needs of Londoners is a worthwhile one.

"Bendy buses are no more injurious to cyclists than any other bus on London's streets right now."

To be scrupulously exact, and since the figures are the Mayor's we've got to believe them, they're involved in 36\\% more collisions with cyclists per kilometre. However, when you adjust them properly for the higher number of conventional buses required to replace bendies the artics turn out to be a safer way to move people around.

Of course, you can always reduce cyclist/bus collisions by removing either the buses or the cyclists, but no one in their right mind is proposing that. The sane response is to follow the least damaging course.











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