Bashing Boris on buses
I hadn’t spotted this before: an independent analysis from TAS, "the UK’s leading specialist public transport consultancy", of "why Boris’s policy for buses in London is wrong".
I’d seen the Guardian quoting this independent organisation saying he had his figures wrong, but this article demolishes his entire policy, regardless of the figures.
Ask average Londoners to name one of Boris’s policies and most will remember the bendy-bus-scrapping policy as his totemic pledge. But on Newsnight it was clear he hadn’t thought the policy through properly at all, and now I see that TAS think the entire policy is simply "wrong".
What kind of indication is this of the reliability of his other policies, which one assumes will have had even less thought put into them than this, his first and most famous one?
April 13th, 2008 at 21.09
Garbage. I was involved in the first new-gen Routemaster project which appeared in The Times last December. It was designed by Capocco, one of the world’s leading bus designers. The first prototype (which used many off-the-shelf parts) will cost £4m and take 3-4 years to develop. Each bus will cost around £220k, but will have a design life of 20 years, compared to the £120m/10 year life of crude, mild-steel belching diesel double decker.
Still, Boris should have called me and I’d have given him the figures…..
And any third party can’t possibly estimate the costs, because the final choice of routemaster hasn’t been made, regardless of Capoco’s suggestions…
April 13th, 2008 at 22.19
Which part of it is garbage? You don’t mention the fact that the new buses won’t be able to carry nearly as many passengers as the artics do, nor the waste of money on unnecessary conductors. Whatever the cost of the buses - and Boris should certainly have called you or anyone else with a clue before going on Newsnight where he clearly didn’t have one himself - the fact remains that the idea of abolishing bendy-buses is seriously flawed and really doesn’t seem to have been properly thought through.