The New Bus for London is an expensive vanity project which the next Mayor will abandon as an outdated and polluting waste of money.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The New Bus for London is an expensive vanity project which the next Mayor will abandon as an outdated and polluting waste of money.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 It will be outdated before the bulk of them are on the road and not the kind of vehicles you would expect to see chugging around the Mayor’s Ultra Low Emission Zone in 2020.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”
IJCIW
NBfL is boosting the economy – who do you think builds them ? It is also creating jobs – the employees who assemble them, and in teh supply chain. And those conductors that you seem to want to see on the unemployed list… It is cretinous of you to think the money could be better spent in other ways ? How ? On benefits ? The way to recover the ecomony is to spend money on things the country needs – buses being one of them… You’re just too blinded by moronic thinking to see it.
Boris Watch
“What an outrageous biased article”
Well, Darren is an opposition politician. What do you want him to do, clap like a performing seal?
“Ken Livingstone is a Marxist dictator”
But you’re not biased, are you? OK, whatever. Can we stick to buses, rather than politics, but if you want to do politics please take a moment to consider the state of the London bus network in 2008 and 2000 and who might have been in charge during that period of massive improvement and ridership increases. That’s if you really are a ‘bus enthusiast’.
As for Boris’s bus, the problems are currently:
1) Weight, the prototypes were more than half a tonne overweight, reducing passenger capacity to below the specification. The production vehicles are still overweight by about 400kg and similarly don’t meet the specification but we’re still buying 600. Why? For comparison the original long Routemaster weight about 5 tonnes less for a capacity only 8 short of the production NB4L
2) Length – they’re 11.3m, more than a metre longer than alternatives which have no problem carrying more people for less weight, thus taking up more road space.
3) Purchase cost – the cost of £367k each once you factor in the development bung we paid for is much higher than Boris was pretending and much higher than competing hybrids developed without us paying a development bung. We therefore get less capacity for our money even before factoring in the capacity penalty for the weight problem.
4) Operating cost – the crew member, who is purely there to stop people falling off the back (they can’t check or sell tickets), costs about £35-40m a year for the fleet, which given that the bus subsidy grant is due to fall to around £350-390m means 11% of London’s central government grant for citywide bus services is going to be spent purely on pointless healthnsafety on a few buses on a few routes so Boris can pretend it’s 1956. This is insane and the next Mayor will have to get rid of them or cut services. The ‘creates employment’ argument is idiotic, why not employ more bus drivers instead? No one benefits if you price Londoners off the network and have to cut services and sack drivers.
5) Competition – there are two perfectly good UK based bus builders serving the UK double decker market, and we’ve basically told the other one (ADL) we’re not interested in their product. There wasn’t even a proper competition, the one Boris held was unconnected to what TfL have actually done, given that the winners of it have had nothing to do with the final product.
In what way does this rigged market remotely help British industry in the way NB4L supporters claim? What incentive do ADL have to invest in improving their product if London is locked into spending hundreds of millions with their competitors? Has Boris suddenly decided free markets don’t work? Odd kind of Tory.
6) Green – the bus is 2010 technology, and given the rate of progress in electric vehicles from 2008 to now it’ll be obsolete within months – we’re already buying pure electric buses as a trial from China and the forthcoming generation of hybrids will have to meet the next stage Euro 6 emissions standards which the current NB4L doesn’t. To make it compliant it needs a new engine, which is to be built in China – part of the excessive cost is apparently to pay for the redesign. Again, competing manufacturers have to fund this themselves rather than get the London public to fork out. The worst part environmentally, however, is that in order to fund this excess the previous target of all new London buses being hybrids from the beginning of 2012 has been abandoned, which means CO2 emissions will be higher taken across the whole fleet – we’re still putting hundreds of normal diesels into service.
7) Britishness – it’s not actually built in Britain and the vaunted British components TfL have been extolling are mostly small stuff and curiously exclude some of the more important bits – as said above the Euro 6 engine is to be built in China while the entire hybrid system is German. Ironically Britain does have its own hybrid drivetrain built by BAE which ADL use, but Wrights have a long history of using Siemens kit, and why not? Not sure why it needs to be spun as some kind of nationalist triumph.
So, it’s expensive, unnecessary, market distorting, damages British industry and London’s environment and is likely to lead to serious budgetary problems but at least it’s not Marxist and doesn’t have a bend in the middle. It would be nice if the debate about the transport needs of a city of 8m people was a bit more grown up, wouldn’t it.
Matthew Hardy
To all those who argue that the NB4L allows rear platform hop-on hop-off: It does so only when the health and safety person is there. So that means, never after hours, and on the 38 route, never at all, as the extra people have been withdrawn.
But the most heinous failure in terms of useability is the lack of opening windows. It’s hot and humid in summer in London and what you need – and get from every other bus in London – is a breeze coming in the windows. The aircon isn’t up to it, and they are up to 7 degrees hotter inside than outside as a result. That is a travesty of the original Routemaster, which had opening windows all round including at the front, making it breezy and pleasant.
Anonymous
The Labour party and the Greens have always been an anti British hate groups. Unlike Ken Livingstone’s Marxist dictatorship when he dictated Transport for London to remove all the Routemasters and only introduced the 2 small short working routes. Plus he introduced the most hateful bendy buses where people never even bothered to pay their fare, its hateful that the German made bendy buses always catches on fire!
The Communist Labour and Green party have always been anti freedom and anti British that they have phobia of open platform buses which allows people freedom whenever to jump on and off the bus between stops. They anti 2nd crew member which makes the bus journeys more safer. But the vile satanic Marxists prefer people to suffer with the misery of 1 person operation where passengers get mugged and beaten up by other passengers on the unsafe bus. So the 2nd crew member is mandatory for all transport services!
The real criminals have always been the Labour and the Green party where they like to deny peoples freedom and their expression. They always abide by the hate books which are the Communist Manifesto and the Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals. The members deserve to be arrested and the vile hate groups banned! They promote nothing but treason and anti British hatred!