The New Bus for London is an expensive vanity project which the next Mayor will abandon as an outdated and polluting waste of money.
By Darren Johnson AM, Green Party member of the London Assembly
The New Bus for London is an expensive vanity project which the next Mayor will abandon as an outdated and polluting waste of money. Nor will you see it carrying paying passengers anywhere else in the world. No one wants it and when the full cost of the bus becomes apparent, Londoners won’t want it either.
The order for 600 of these new buses will add up to £80m onto the fares bill between now and 2016. That is a huge sum of extra cash to find during years of austerity driven cuts in the government’s grant to Transport for London.
The extra ‘health and safety’ staff members on each of these 600 new buses will cost around £37m extra a year. We can now add to that figure the £32m difference between the ‘average’ cost of 600 ordinary hybrid buses and the Mayor’s estimate of what his new buses will cost.
The TfL press release states that “The price difference is accounted for by the much higher specification of the new bus compared to a standard hybrid bus.” The emission results seem impressive and the Mayor makes bold claims about this being the greenest of buses.
However, there is growing evidence that the lab results for emissions are very different from the pollution found at the roadside. Real world results from the prototype buses show that they are consuming twice as much fuel as on the Mayoral press releases and that probably means that the emissions are twice what is claimed. The production line vehicles may be a bit better, but none of the hype about them being the greenest vehicles in Europe should be taken at face value.
The Mayor has boasted about the green credentials of these new buses, but they will all have to be retrofitted at the end of next year with additional anti-pollution devices in order to keep up with the higher standards for all new buses being produced throughout Europe. It will be outdated before the bulk of them are on the road and not the kind of vehicles you would expect to see chugging around the Mayor’s Ultra Low Emission Zone in 2020.
I accept that it is a very nice bus to look at, but the third entrance and second staircase makes it unsellable outside of London. Nor can people in other parts of the country afford the higher fares that stem from the luxury of employing a bus assistant whose only real job is to stop people falling off the rear platform when it is open.
Normally bus operators in London buy all the red buses and then recoup some of the capital outlay when they renew their fleet and sell their old buses to some provincial bus company. As the operators can’t sell them on, they don’t want to buy them, which is why the Mayor required TfL to buy the buses themselves, at a premium rate and take on all the upfront costs and risks.
The NBfL will remain in London for all its working life of 14 years. By the time of the next Mayoral elections there will be a new generation of hybrid buses outperforming these buses and costing a lot less. The next Mayor will be making the switch to electric buses, rather than hybrids.
14 Responses to “The New Bus for London is an expensive vanity project”
OldLb
Peanuts.
Look at the 38,000 million and rising bill for HS2.
Nothing like screwing the poor so MPs can get back home 10 minutes quicker.
Cole
No doubt you think it’s ok for Tories to waste money. And all these Conservative ministers and council leaders driving around in enormous cars at our expense.
Bus Enthusiast
What an outrageous biased article that Darren Johnson have written. There are people that liked the New Bus for London because of the design and the restoration of the Open Platform which the original Routemasters had. Go ride the 38 on the NBFL and talk to people if they liked the bus?
Ken Livingstone is a Marxist dictator, (equivalent to Stalin and Mao) he hates London culture and the way of life, that’s why he viciously removed the Routemasters from full service between 2003 to 2005. He denies the rights of Londoners to leave the bus whatever they want because he is in full support of a OPO bus.So if i am stuck on a traffic jam and the driver wont let me off, it makes me late for work because the bus have no open platform which lets me out of the bus whatever i want.
Another thing, since you oppose the NBFL, it means you want jobs to be cut and rise of unemployment. The open platform guards are empolyed by the operators so it saves the tax payer money for giving them money via dole money which makes them stay home and become depressed!!! If you want Unemployment to reduce, London needs to carry on investing more of jobs regardless what kind of specification. The more you criticize the NBFL, the less faith you have with the industry of Britain.
How would you feel if your running late for a GLA meeting and then you missed the bus because the door have no open platform. And what about if your stuck on a traffic jam and the bus stop is at the other side of the street but the driver wont let you out because of the Marxist Health and Safety measure? The open platform should be a mandatory requirement for all buses in Central London.
Londoners like the NBFL, it does not hurt to accept and get over it because it exists.
Neil Mclean
I personally am overjoyed with the NB4L so straight away your assumption nobody wants it looks silly …The best bus since last hop on vehicle..Thankyou Boris!!!!!
Christine Clarke
what are these cretinous idiots think they are doing, Johnson is such a buffoon, only wants to spend money on toys for himself, no humanitarism at all, please, please do not let him in as pm, we will be worse off than we are now, ” if that was humanly possible ” leave our n h s alone and stop this absurd idea of 600 buses, they are all pals together god help us, this gov are supposed to keep us safe, how ???? they have sacked our wonderful forces sacked the police and more to go, selling off ouir justice system, privatising our n h s so keep your hands off, they belong to the people not you, start with the bankers, get into the real world. and for the bus buff’s you must have money to burn, and be in work, have a thought for those who lost there jobs thanks to this cretinous lot, and that includes that buffoon clown Johnson spending millions on buses , that money could be used to boost the econemy, put people in work, but like the rest of the idiots they just smirk and carry on, i could give them a good slapping and anyone else who think they are the in thing.