CRIKEY!
From the Evening Standard, London, 24th October 2008
LONDON'S new Routemaster bus will operate on a scale far wider than expected but the much-hyped public competition to design it is a sideshow, according to a senior Transport for London manager. As the Mayor, Boris Johnson, prepares to unveil the results of the competition, it has emerged that TfL will order up to 800 of the open-platform new Routemasters, almost double the expected number. They will serve all central London's busiest routes, not just bendy routes.
The design contest has attracted around 470 entries, including one from Norman Foster. But David Hampson-Ghani, TfL's programme manager for new buses, said it was seen inside TfL as "almost a consultation" to the key effort, talks with the manufacturers. "The key objective is to replace the current buses that are used on central London's busiest bus routes," said Mr Hampson-Ghani in a recent presentation to the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport obtained by the Standard. "It's not about replacing bendy buses, it's about replacing whatever is operating at the moment and that may include bendy buses.
"We will simply hand over a folder of the winning designs [from the competition] to whoever wins the manufacturing tender and say: 'See what you can do with these.' The ultimate aim is to have a single manufacturer who will work up the design, prototype it and then build it." Conductor operation and an open platform, however, are non-negotiable. An invitation to tender will be issued in February 2009 and a contract for a "prototype and initial service vehicles" will be awarded next October. Mr Hampson-Ghani said the order would be for "700 to 800 vehicles over a three-year period". TfL had been in talks with the Department for Transport and the EU, he said, and had reached tentative agreement that regulations do allow an open-platform bus. "We already have buses like that on the roads today."
It had been thought that the major manufacturers were lukewarm about the scheme. "If you speak to the manufacturers privately, they'll tell you that making a vehicle like that is no longer possible in this day and age," said Robert Jack, managing editor of Transit magazine. However, both publicly and in private, Britain's two largest bus manufacturers expressed strong enthusiasm to the Standard. "TfL has been in contact and we are very interested," said a spokesman for Ballymena-based Wrightbus. Earlier this month TfL's head, Peter Hendy, visited the company's Northern Ireland plant to discuss the Routemaster and other projects.
"We are going to be all systems go. There is a solution there without a doubt," said a spokesman for Falkirk-based Alexander Dennis. "If London wants a Routemaster, we are going to be delighted to oblige." Chief executive Colin Robertson said his 80-strong engineering team was devoting increasing amounts of time to the project: "There is a good chance we could come up with a new design. We want to keep our top-dog position [in London] when it comes to the Routemaster."
"I now backing Obama!"
The new Routemaster is almost certain to use a hybrid drive, where a diesel engine powers batteries which run the bus, making it dramatically cleaner than existing bendy and double-deck buses. A conventional hybrid double-decker will be unveiled by Alexander Dennis at the bus industry's main annual trade fair next month. The order of up to 800 Routemasters is far more than needed to replace the bendy routes, which need 350 buses to operate them. It offers the prospect of being able to build the buses at a lower cost per unit than a smaller run.
If no major manufacturer is willing to make the buses, one industry expert said others could easily step forward. "Making a bus is not an expensive production-line job with robots and the like," says Hilton Holloway, news editor of Autocar magazine, which produced its own Routemaster design last year. "Compared to volume cars it is crude a bit of a cottage industry, with a lot of fabrication. Some of the new Routemaster designs are pretty radical but the majors have been making buses the same way for a hundred years. They might not be the best people to do this." Opposition members of the London Assembly have criticised the drive to introduce a new Routemaster. Val Shawcross, Labour chair of the assembly's transport committee, said the Mayor was "letting his personal prejudice override any sense of reason and should return the drawing board as soon as possible".
However, the new bus does appear to have caught the public imagination. Rukaiya Russell, a house music artist from New Cross, has released a track called Bring Back the Routemaster. The rap includes the ding-ding of a Routemaster's bell and the shouting-out of all the RM route numbers swept away in Ken Livingstone's cull of 2003-5. "Walking around central London one day, I just thought how I missed jumping on and off down Oxford Street, and I found myself singing 'Bring back the Routemaster'," says Russell on her MySpace site.
See also;
http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/10/bend-it-like-boris.html
Boris Johnson on a Routemaster
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