The New Bus for London is an expensive vanity project which the next Mayor will abandon as an outdated and polluting waste of money.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The New Bus for London is an expensive vanity project which the next Mayor will abandon as an outdated and polluting waste of money.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 It will be outdated before the bulk of them are on the road and not the kind of vehicles you would expect to see chugging around the Mayor’s Ultra Low Emission Zone in 2020.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.
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14 Responses to “The New Bus for London is an expensive vanity project”
Christine Clarke
why are you thanking him, he is spending millions on something that we do not need, when there are more important things to spend the money on, ie : putting people in work, after these idiots thought it was a good idea to sack half the country, the money should be used for the economy,
why do we have to keep up with the other countries, ???you are in work i presume
what is wrong with what we have, if the econemy was up and running and thriving maybe, but use your common sense.
Neil Mclean
ken livingstone took jobs away…boris has returned 26 new jobs on route 11 boosting those out of work like myself
OldLb
That’s because you’re lacking the ability to think.
You think that because I’m telling people that Labour have pissed trillions away and that I think its wrong, that for some mad reason that must mean that I’m in favour of the the Tories pissing trillions up the wall.
Shows why you should never be allowed near other people’s money, and probably you should be kept away from sharp objects too.
Has it not occurred to you that I might think that the Tories are profligate piss artists with other people’s money too?
If you want a reference go and ask Lord Taylor of Warwick what he thinks of Blagger. He’s a tory, and he got done for fraud.
Paul
I live on the first route going over to the NBfL (24). I have some mobility problems and find this bus much easier to use and more comfortable. I also like the helping hand the new conductors can give (a reassuring presence when the bus full and noisy too). The design is beautiful and I think it will attract people to London.
John Griffin
They should really spend less on buses and spend money on the transport London really needs very badly – TRAMS! The decision to do away with them has proved to be a disastrous mistake. Trams get preferential treatment at traffic lights, etc. and would get commuters to there places of work much more quickly than buses or, indeed, private cars ever could.
I have seen trams working in several European and some British cities and they are much more efficient than the buses. They also encourage drivers to leave their gas guzzling cars at home.