Bus design

[urban]

Have they done the maths though, really? In the larger busier provincial networks, both urban an inter-urban.

Take a look at Lothian, ever the pioneer. Turns out that for crush loaded routes, with longer legal vehicle lengths the decision to have one or two doors (or even three axles) is now largely an irrelevance to the more important variables of overall length and staff costs. A 100 seat dual door triaxle seems to bring greater benefits than simply adding a door. Smoothing out and indeed lowering the vehicle requirement is the apparent aimed for benefit of that extra capacity and its necessary extra door, rather than increasing boarding speed or overall journey times.

They could have gone for triple doors and even a tram style lower salloon on such big buses, if they had wanted to speed up boarding and thus maintain frequencies and have faster journey times. But why would they? That just means you have to buy more buses, have bigger depots and employ more drivers. And then you're stuck with an even more unusual bus that would have no real value on the second hand market, and cost even more to convert to a single door school bus.

Turns out that a single driver sitting on a very long bus in a bus lane doing largely nothing in long-ish dwell times, but doing it on a basic wage and standard shift pattern as part of a centrally planned city bus network, is a quite economical way of achieving capacity improvements. As is presumably moving large volumes of fresh air in large heavy vehicles on polluted congested streets outside the peak. Not ideal, but far better than the alternatives.

One wonders then, why the benefits of longer double decker buses hasn't also been realised by management in other cities. London is probably too hamstring by the bureaucracy of tendering and the hangovers from artics to be so innovative. But for cities like Reading, which are near or at crush loading on their core routes, but which will never be suitable for trams or tram like buses, it's probably an ideal solution. Especially where you already own your own fleet and directly employ your drivers. Might even be a great incentive for some councils to kick out the big groups and independents and start their own bus company.

I don't quite understand your points here. Are you saying a longer journey time is more economical for the bus company? Surely that just increases the vehicle requirement and drives away passengers.

 

[K4016td]

One fits all design is simply archaic. Most bus companies in Europe seem to have buses of various lenght/design to suit them to various type of the tasks. For an urban bus route with frequent stops they have ones with less seats and multiple doors for suburban routes where a typical journey is longer, the buses have more seats that are more comfy and less doors.

Also in the morning and afternoon peak they insert more buses to operation to make couple of journeys (often older ones who join only during peaks), whereas in the UK operators seem to stick whatever minutes throughtout the day approach we can make with the same number and type of bus or often they run anything that has 4 wheels at random. Thats the reality of commercial operations sadly...

 

[MCR247]

One fits all design is simply archaic. Most bus companies in Europe seem to have buses of various lenght/design to suit them to various type of the tasks. For an urban bus route with frequent stops they have ones with less seats and multiple doors for suburban routes where a typical journey is longer, the buses have more seats that are more comfy and less doors.

Also in the morning and afternoon peak they insert more buses to operation to make couple of journeys (often older ones who join only during peaks), whereas in the UK operators seem to stick whatever minutes throughtout the day approach we can make with the same number and type of bus or often they run anything that has 4 wheels at random. Thats the reality of commercial operations sadly...

To be fair, I think most (if not most, a lot) of bus companies have more buses in operation at peak times. You don’t see a change in frequency simply because the extra buses are there to maintain that frequency standard frequency as the running time is longer due to traffic/passenger numbers etc.

 

[urban]

To be fair, I think most (if not most, a lot) of bus companies have more buses in operation at peak times. You don’t see a change in frequency simply because the extra buses are there to maintain that frequency standard frequency as the running time is longer due to traffic/passenger numbers etc.

Is this still common practice? In my experience most routes have no extra buses in the peak, so there is actually a drop in frequency. This has got worse in recent years as congestion has worsened, lengthening journey times. Back in the day the frequency was higher in the peaks but I haven't seen this anywhere for a long time.

 

[GusB]

On the multi-door debate it was interesting that on LinkedIn recently none other than Bob Montgomery, former MD of Stagecoach UK Bus and now an independent consultant remarked that urban bus design in the UK has gone backwards since the 70s, from dual door to single door design.

I'm certainly not arguing against multi-door vehicles where it is appropriate to use them - ie, urban services where people are both alighting and boarding at various stops along a route and there isn't a single "main destination" along that route. I've lived in places where dual-door was once the norm (Aberdeen and Edinburgh) and it worked because most routes were cross-city and in the busy central sections you had lots of people getting on and off at the same stop; it absolutely makes sense to segregate those passengers.

Where multi-door falls down is when routes are hub-and-spoke, where people are mostly boarding at the extremities of the network and heading into the centre and vice versa; those passenger flows are largely one-way. Seating capacity is already reduced by the requirement to have wheelchair spaces and any additional door reduces that number of seats further. This isn't a huge issue when people are mainly doing short hops, but for any journey that exceeds 20 minutes I'd certainly prefer having a seat

Maybe we should go back to when we had separate urban operators using dual-door vehicles and those operating beyond the town/city boundary managed fine with a single door. We could even have restrictions on picking up and setting down within the urban boundary, so that those people who were travelling to and from further afield weren't delayed by urban passengers making short journeys!

Maybe we have gone backwards, but I don't think it's anything to do with the design of the buses; it's how they're used that's the problem.

I also think that the argument that many bus stations only allow front door boarding so dual door buses aren't practical is a red herring. The wheelchair ramp doesn't have to be at the middle door. It can be at the front, and on such bus stations you simply load and unload at the front door, with most journeys either starting or terminating in such bays. I know it works because I've experienced it in Bath with First's dual door buses.

I'm not sure that it is a red herring. You argue that the wheelchair ramp doesn't have to be at the middle door, and I agree with this point; however, manufacturers generally provide "London spec" vehicles with dual doors or "provincial spec" without. You'd have to persuade them to offer a dual-door option with the ramp at the front. It's not technically impossible to do, but there will be some expense involved if the London-spec vehicles are cascaded elsewhere.

 

[joieman]

Is this still common practice? In my experience most routes have no extra buses in the peak, so there is actually a drop in frequency. This has got worse in recent years as congestion has worsened, lengthening journey times. Back in the day the frequency was higher in the peaks but I haven't seen this anywhere for a long time.

My usual bus route, Arriva's service 127 between Leicester and Shepshed, has two additional workings in the morning during term time that terminate at the bottom end of Old Ashby Road in Loughborough.

 

[Ghostbus]

One fits all design is simply archaic. Most bus companies in Europe seem to have buses of various lenght/design to suit them to various type of the tasks. For an urban bus route with frequent stops they have ones with less seats and multiple doors for suburban routes where a typical journey is longer, the buses have more seats that are more comfy and less doors.

One size fits so has probably never been how the UK does buses. Here's what was going on just a few years ago....

(Buses Magazine article on the Lothian E400XLB)

EXTRA LONG BEAUTIES

Lothian Buses has broken with British convention by commissioning...

www.keybuses.com

interest in tri-axle double-deckers became apparent around 20 years ago when various export models stopped off in Edinburgh on their way from Falkirk to the Far East. In January 1998, for instance, an Alexander ALX500-bodied Dennis Trident for the Long Win Bus Company in Hong Kong called at Lothian’s head office to allow managers to inspect it.

The reason the Lothian buses are Enviro400s rather than Enviro500s is down to the specification. The Enviro500 has a different body structure with integrated airconditioning, which affects fuel consumption, while the body for Lothian is essentially an extended Enviro400. The Enviro500 remains Alexander Dennis’s three-axle double-deck offering for international markets.

The Lothian examples are the first for a UK customer, with a longer front overhang than those built for the Far East, where ground clearance is more critical. Besides Alexander Dennis, it is being offered in the UK with MCV and Wright bodywork.

‘We first had thoughts about high-capacity buses late in 2017 and we first approached Volvo to build the chassis. Volvo offered us the B8L but we wanted to get the front end right – we wanted the same front module as on our fleet of B5s to give us conformity with our existing fleet, with the same cab and front overhang. Volvo said it could do it and this was designed in.

‘In March 2018 we spoke to the people at Alexander Dennis to find out if they could build the body we wanted. We were open and honest with them and they were happy to get on board with us. They could see that the project widens their portfolio alongside the Enviro500 and gives them a better competitive range.

Hall says the challenges extend beyond the initial appearance or capacity of these vehicles. ‘The damp Scottish weather and salt on the roads can be tough on our buses so we wanted to future-proof with aluminium panels that would be protected against the weather. Alexander Dennis developed a phosphate coating that is applied after external panels are cut and shaped. There is no cutting or trimming once these are fitted to the bus and these sealed panels act as a primer for painting.

In other words, where an existing product is less than ideal, it's better to listen to your customers needs and give them what they want, rather than something you designed for someone else or indeed is just your bog standard item to fill a certain segement in your catalogue.

Also in the morning and afternoon peak they insert more buses to operation to make couple of journeys (often older ones who join only during peaks), whereas in the UK operators seem to stick whatever minutes throughtout the day approach we can make with the same number and type of bus or often they run anything that has 4 wheels at random. Thats the reality of commercial operations sadly...

It's a little bit more complicated than that. From the same article above.....

Lothian is not buying these extra long doubledeckers just because it can. It has a business plan for their use. ‘We hope to have 30 of the new buses by Christmas and all 42 in service at the end of January,’ says Hall. ‘Although peaks in Edinburgh have become flatter, we do need to retain what we call rush buses to add in extra capacity at peaks.

‘The idea is that we can remove some of these extra buses and provide additional capacity with the B8Ls. Existing buses carry 84 to 87 customers including standees, but we can provide the same capacity with two of the new buses as three older buses.

‘We can reduce frequencies slightly without impacting on our customers. We know customers like to sit down and we can provide the seats with a huge cost saving.

This also allows us to provide flatter bus graphs, and with less peak work we can avoid too many split duties, which are not always popular with our drivers.

‘As Edinburgh evolves our customers want to move quicker and we shall be adding more limited stop journeys to maintain volume at peaks. The second door will help speed journeys by reducing dwell time at stops, important for high-capacity buses. Lothian abandoned the second door 10 years ago, partly on safety grounds, but with plug doors, digital cameras, better interlocks and audio announcements when the doors are closing, we don’t anticipate problems.’

That's a commercially run operator deciding to use highly bespoke vehicles and tightly controlled allocations, to remove/reduce the need for peak buses. The problem is and always will be staff costs. Lothian can easily afford to have spare peak time only buses lying around doing nothing, and has been doing that for years. But when an opportunity arose to reduce the associated staffing costs in using them, they took it. They cast it as being about staff welfare, i.e. reducing the number of awkward shifts, but we all know it's about reducing drivers hours overall. Not even a return to full municipal operation with a total monopoly over the network is going to change that imperative to reduce staffing costs, since Lothian already essentially has a monopoly (arguably because their focus is on service delivery and controlling costs).

I don't quite understand your points here. Are you saying a longer journey time is more economical for the bus company? Surely that just increases the vehicle requirement and drives away passengers.

Not at all. See above. Rather than use dual doors simply to speed up journey times (although that is a long-term goal), they went for longer buses to maintain the same journey times but with less buses overall (so a slightly longer waiting time for some) as a means to keep passengers interested and reduce overall vehicle requirement.

Eh?

See above.

If operators did the math, they would see that it's no longer a simple matter of one or two doors anymore. If you've got crush loading and can accommodate them, then you might be better off buying much longer vehicles. They come with a second door, but that's not remotely the only reason why these buses can achieve the objective of moving more people using less vehicles. Indeed, the goal here was to retain a very healthy number of downstairs seats....

The high-back Lazzerini Pratico seating is for 61 in the upper deck and 39 in the lower deck, with up to 31 standees – a total of 131 passengers.

Rather than the unattractive choice between faster loading (2 door) or more seats (1 door), Lothian managed to do it all: add a door, keep customers wanting a seat happy, and reduce overall costs. They did the math. But they first adjusted their initial assumptions, due to the change in the law allowing longer vehicles.

The second door might also help with dwell times to reduce journey times, but they don't envision using that by itself. To achieve those gains they were going to add more limited stop journeys in peak times. Whether that actually happened, since this was all planned before Covid, is the question. Or indeed whether Covid has completely busted the maths entirely. If not, maybe other managers, such as in Reading, need to consider taking this same approach to the problem of one or two doors.

 

[Bornin1980s]

I'm not sure that it is a red herring. You argue that the wheelchair ramp doesn't have to be at the middle door, and I agree with this point; however, manufacturers generally provide "London spec" vehicles with dual doors or "provincial spec" without. You'd have to persuade them to offer a dual-door option with the ramp at the front. It's not technically impossible to do, but there will be some expense involved if the London-spec vehicles are cascaded elsewhere.

I've been on an ex London Enviro 200 operated by Redline in Aylesbury. The second door was only used for wheelchairs, and wasn't used during my journey.

One size fits so has probably never been how the UK does buses. Here's what was going on just a few years ago....

(Buses Magazine article on the Lothian E400XLB)

EXTRA LONG BEAUTIES

Lothian Buses has broken with British convention by commissioning...

www.keybuses.com

In other words, where an existing product is less than ideal, it's better to listen to your customers needs and give them what they want, rather than something you designed for someone else or indeed is just your bog standard item to fill a certain segement in your catalogue.



It's a little bit more complicated than that. From the same article above.....



That's a commercially run operator deciding to use highly bespoke vehicles and tightly controlled allocations, to remove/reduce the need for peak buses. The problem is and always will be staff costs. Lothian can easily afford to have spare peak time only buses lying around doing nothing, and has been doing that for years. But when an opportunity arose to reduce the associated staffing costs in using them, they took it. They cast it as being about staff welfare, i.e. reducing the number of awkward shifts, but we all know it's about reducing drivers hours overall. Not even a return to full municipal operation with a total monopoly over the network is going to change that imperative to reduce staffing costs, since Lothian already essentially has a monopoly (arguably because their focus is on service delivery and controlling costs).



Not at all. See above. Rather than use dual doors simply to speed up journey times (although that is a long-term goal), they went for longer buses to maintain the same journey times but with less buses overall (so a slightly longer waiting time for some) as a means to keep passengers interested and reduce overall vehicle requirement.


See above.

If operators did the math, they would see that it's no longer a simple matter of one or two doors anymore. If you've got crush loading and can accommodate them, then you might be better off buying much longer vehicles. They come with a second door, but that's not remotely the only reason why these buses can achieve the objective of moving more people using less vehicles. Indeed, the goal here was to retain a very healthy number of downstairs seats....

Rather than the unattractive choice between faster loading (2 door) or more seats (1 door), Lothian managed to do it all: add a door, keep customers wanting a seat happy, and reduce overall costs. They did the math. But they first adjusted their initial assumptions, due to the change in the law allowing longer vehicles.

The second door might also help with dwell times to reduce journey times, but they don't envision using that by itself. To achieve those gains they were going to add more limited stop journeys in peak times. Whether that actually happened, since this was all planned before Covid, is the question. Or indeed whether Covid has completely busted the maths entirely. If not, maybe other managers, such as in Reading, need to consider taking this same approach to the problem of one or two doors.

Simple explanation; Lothian is not Stagecoach!

 

[PG]

Simple explanation; Lothian is not Stagecoach!

And yet over 30 years ago Stagecoach preceded Lothian with the Megadekka, a tri-axle 110 seater Leyland Olympian, albeit single door.

Photo shows double decker bus in Stagecoach stripes by megabus13601, license cc-by-sa-2.0

 

[GusB]

I've been on an ex London Enviro 200 operated by Redline in Aylesbury. The second door was only used for wheelchairs, and wasn't used during my journey.

There will be some exceptions. If Redline is happy to utilise the middle door for wheelchair users only, that's fine; the operator clearly accepts the lack of seating capacity.

The problem with utilising ex-London vehicles, where the accessible entrance is in the middle, is that bus stations of the drive-in/reverse-out kind only permit boarding and alighting from a front entrance; having the ramp/lift equipment in the middle is incompatible with the infrastructure.

 

[Goldfish62]

The problem with utilising ex-London vehicles, where the accessible entrance is in the middle, is that bus stations of the drive-in/reverse-out kind only permit boarding and alighting from a front entrance; having the ramp/lift equipment in the middle is incompatible with the infrastructure.

Although not ideal that can be worked around, such as at Kingston Cromwell Road. I've also seen similar at Penzance bus station. First's open toppers have retained the centre ramps, albeit converted to manual operation.

 

[Tetchytyke]

Although not ideal that can be worked around, such as at Kingston Cromwell Road.

Making disabled people wait outside the bus station at a completely different stop to everyone else is quite a bit more than "not ideal" IMO.

Roger French highlighted his concerns:

This is certainly a practical solution but it does rather smack of discrimination against those with accessibility needs who need to form a special queue to board. I wonder if it’s legal?

 

[Goldfish62]

Making disabled people wait outside the bus station at a completely different stop to everyone else is quite a bit more than "not ideal" IMO.

It's not outside the bus station and it's been the same basic arrangement there since wheelchair-accessible buses were introduced. It's not a new thing. Roger is wrong yet again.

 

[PG]

Making disabled people wait outside the bus station at a completely different stop to everyone else is quite a bit more than "not ideal" IMO.

Roger French highlighted his concerns:

Considering some retail premises have adapted to the disability discrimination legislation with a myriad of solutions with some merely fitting a doorbell to summon somebody to come and serve them at the door - not exactly inclusive! On that basis no it's not ideal but they do get into the bus.

 

[Bornin1980s]

One thing I've long wondered, how do they do low floor conversions on rear wheel drive minibuses (like the Mercedes Sprinter)? How do they fit the drive shaft underneath?