A headline from the Standard to make patriotic cockney hearts sing: “Boris buses axed from routes across London as Sadiq Khan ‘cleans up previous mayor’s messy legacy’”. The original Routemasters, introduced in the mid-1950s to fill the hole in the transport network left by the decline of trams, were a fixture on the streets of the capital for half a century. The New Bus for London – overweight, overpriced, overheated – is on its way out after just 14 years. If anyone out there is in the market for a 12-tonne metaphor for Boris Johnson’s contribution to British national life, you’re in luck.
Actually, the bus is not quite as near the end of the line as a careless read of that headline would suggest. It’s true that the buses are to be withdrawn from three routes this year, and two more by the end of 2028. But the reason is not, in fact, Sadiq Khan’s irrational desire to erase his predecessor’s legacy, probably while laughing like a maniac: Transport for London (TfL) wants to switch the capital to zero-emission electric buses. These don’t fit the bill, so that’s that.
Even then, that will not be that for quite some time. Generally, TfL requires bus companies to supply their own buses, but it took the unusual step of buying 1,000 of these fat boys itself. Each has an anticipated 14-year lifespan and the newest were built in 2017, so they could be running on other routes for five years yet. When they’ve only been going since 2012, that’s no minor reprieve.
What is clear, though, is that Sadiq Khan will not be crying any crocodile tears: the Mayor sounded the buses’ death knell when he told TfL not to buy any more of them back in 2016. And if their demise “means getting rid of the legacy of the mess made by the previous mayor”, he said earlier this month, like a sassy bitch who lives for drama, “so be it”.
How the man on the Clapham omnibus feels about all this is hard to know: I’ve not been able to find polling. But I, for one, will not mourn. The new bus for London has been a catastrophe.
The first problem is the price tag. Each bus cost £350,000 – really, what is it with Boris Johnson and questionable sums of money beginning with those digits? – compared with £190,000 for standard double-deckers. That figure was meant to come down as more of them rolled off the production line; TfL could even have made money, through its cut of sales to other markets. Alas, TfL only bought 1,000, the precise number required for it to claim its share of the IP, and other markets didn’t want any.
That’s because, despite extensive up-front design work by Thomas Heatherwick and Wrightbus, the buses never worked very well. Their diesel-hybrid engines were stymied by repeated battery failures, meaning they often turned into pure-diesel buses which, being heavier, were actually more polluting than the vehicles already on the roads. They were also quite comically uncomfortable, and brought forth complaints of lack of leg room, poorly placed handrails and a tendency to turn into ovens the instant the sun came out. (The windows didn’t open until they’d been refitted at a cost of millions; it did at least provide them with the vaguely amusing nickname “roastmasters”.)
Worst of all, the new buses couldn’t even deliver the supposed benefits of the better-looking Routemasters they were meant to resurrect. The three doors and two staircases were intended to allow faster boarding, and to let passengers jump on and off the back while imagining they were in the Swinging Sixties. That picturesque decade, though, had a rather more cavalier attitude to passenger safety, and to work in the 21st century the new buses required conductors as well as drivers, adding £62,000 each year to a single bus’s running costs. Multiple doors also enabled fare dodging. In 2016, TfL announced the new buses would henceforth be opening one door only and laid off the conductors. That did good things for its balance sheet, but terrible ones for the prospects of its expensive new bus.
How did what could still, in 2012, call itself a serious world city stumble into this spectacular white elephant? It’d be easy, and also fair, to say simply “Boris Johnson” and leave it to that. But the reason Johnson was prone to creating this kind of mess stemmed, I think, from his particular view of politics: like an ambitious Roman senator, he always seemed to see the world as merely a stage set for his grand ambition; those of us who populated it were just the mob.
In the same way, the New Bus for London was conceived less as a functional mode of transport than as a piece of scenery – a bus designed for the benefit of people who would never even dream of travelling on one. No wonder Johnson found a kindred spirit in Thomas Heatherwick. They deserve each other. London didn’t deserve either.
[Further reading: Inside Labour’s escalating immigration feud]
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