Anyone been on one yet? Are the worth the price or is it just an expensive white elephant?
"There's a software glitch and we are running the new bus with the rear platform shut. "Teething problems" say Tfl ..." BBC London's Transport correspondent on Twitter.Anyone been on one yet? Are the worth the price or is it just an expensive white elephant?
Anyone been on one yet? Are the worth the price or is it just an expensive white elephant?
At the moment, it's only route 38 Victoria - Clapton.
Personally, I think they're a colossal waste of money, there was nothing wrong with the artics, and even if you think there was, over 90 standard hybrid buses could be bought for the £11m that this fleet of eight have cost.
The Routemaster did sell outside of London
Northern General had a sizeable fleet of front loading Routemasters, and at least one is preserved.......... http://www.flickr.com/photos/emdjt42/3447003757/
(I think the guy who's Flickr this is off is on here so I hope he doesnt mind!)
The ex-London Citaro artics suit the Bristol 904 Park & Ride well too![]()
Shame they abandoned the board at any door principle though. I thought they might have allowed it for those people with a 'Key' smartcard.Not that I'm complaining, those artics are well suited to Go North East's number 58![]()
At the moment, it's only route 38 Victoria - Clapton.
Personally, I think they're a colossal waste of money, there was nothing wrong with the artics, and even if you think there was, over 90 standard hybrid buses could be bought for the £11m that this fleet of eight have cost.
That £11m for a fleet of 8 contains a significant amount of development money - a burden most operators don't carry and will become decreasingly significant as the fleet size increases. By the time you have a fleet of 90 (still a drop in the ocean for London) the difference will be far less galling.
It's all rather more important than that anyway, it will (hopefully) be a much better bus for London and will certainly become iconic for the city in a way that I'm not sure anything has been since the Millennium attractions.
That £11m for a fleet of 8 contains a significant amount of development money - a burden most operators don't carry and will become decreasingly significant as the fleet size increases. By the time you have a fleet of 90 (still a drop in the ocean for London) the difference will be far less galling.
It's all rather more important than that anyway, it will (hopefully) be a much better bus for London and will certainly become iconic for the city in a way that I'm not sure anything has been since the Millennium attractions.
The introductory timetable is at
http://www.londonbusroutes.net/times/038X.pdf
Bus 38 already runs every 1-2 minutes in peak hours, and has a PVR of 68, so even if this bus replaced an existing journey there wouldn't be much impact on the route as a whole.
Far too soon to establish if it's a white elephant.
If you looked at the original RM you could easily have claimed that was a white elephant. It didn't sell outside London, was front-engined and 2 manned at the time the industry was moving to rear-engine OMO vehicles. Yet few would claim they were anything other than successful.
Compare and contrast with the Daimler Fleetline.
LT bought over 2,500 of these yet started withdrawing them when they were as little as 8 years old. However they saw long service in other areas like the West Mids for over 25 years. So you could say from LT's point of view they were white elephants, yet wider evidence doesn't support that.
The new London bus's success will depend on a few points:
- passenger reaction
- reliability in service
- uptake by other operators
and, more difficult to identify, whether it moves bus design forward.
It's got alot of technology which could easily be seen in mainstream vehicles in years to come.
Sorry - should have put 'barely' sold outside London.
If Wikipedia is to be believed Northern General bought 50 new plus one prototype.
Compared to other buses of the same generation, the RM had a production run of 2876 - virtually all of which went to LT (or London Country).
The Bristol Lodekka sold over 5,200 to various operators - it would probably have been more if Bristol hadn't been prevented from selling in the open market.
The later Bristol VR sold over 4,500.
The Atlantean came in at over 15,000.
None of these three sold to LT in any volumes - the Atlantean was rejected in favour of the Fleetline. I don't think LT ever took Bristol double-deckers post war ?
I agree with what you are saying about Routemasters, the problem here is that "image" will count for a lot more with the Boris buses than facts do.
As far as I'm concerned, if London wants to waste lots of its money on conceptual vehicles (rather than practically addressing how to move large numbers of people) then that's fair enough. However its obvious that most London buses tend to get too old for the capital half way through their fifteen/twenty year life, and are therefore dumped on the rest of the country.
Thats fair enough when you are talking about a standard Denis Trident (like the ones First are introducing in Sheffield, after their tour of duty in London - all you need to do is board up the "rear" door), but quite a pain when you have a non-standard vehicle - how are places like Gateshead/ Rotherham going to deal with a bus with two staircases?!)
Well, i don't think that's what they're thinking about. What they seem to be planning on is keeping them in London for all their design life, like the RT and RM, and not cascading them, which is why they specified their own specification rather than allowing operators to put their own in.
What are these inherant problems that will reduce its life expectancy?
The Routemaster was developed & built in partnership with LT, & until the 70s most operators specified there own designs., so a bit unfair to call the Routemaster a White Elephant, as they were specifically designed for London.
Don't forget that the Lodeka begat the Dennis Loline as well...arguably a better licence-built version.
In the past British half-deckers have been sold in lhd markets, with left-hand cabs and even right-hand cabs (e.g. for Madrid) but right-side platforms!
I travelled on one today and I've got to say, I loved it.
The development costs weren't actually that high, and I'm getting sick of the media quoting that figure. Once there's 100 of the things, it won't matter.