From Left Foot Forward:
The New Bus for London is loved by many and nice to look at, but it
is wrong in so many ways that it is hard to know where to start. It is
probably bad news for British exports, probably bad on value for money,
very bad for fares and awful for the environment.
The
Mayor has created what he describes as a ‘world class piece of
technology’, but the problem is that the world doesn’t want it. Despite
the Mayor talking up ‘covetous foreigners’ sniffing around the new bus
earlier in the year, the reality is that the odd design of the bus makes
export sales unlikely.
Rather than being a bonus for British industry,
it may well divert one of our main bus companies away from a focus on export sales. In fact, the unique design that the manufacturer is unlikely to find any takers for these Boris buses anywhere else in the UK.
Despite TfL denials, it is the unique design which has led Transport
for London (TfL) to take the unprecedented step of buying the buses
themselves and to state the buses would spend all their 14-year
‘economic life in London’.
Instead of achieving the economies of scale from a production run of
thousands, the Mayor is ordering 600 over a four-year period. Instead of
opening up the bidding for building the new bus to a selection of
manufacturers in a highly competitive market, we have a monopoly
supplier dictating the price of a Mayoral manifesto promise.
Instead of a bus which can be resold in a few years time to operators elsewhere in the country,
we have a bus which will live and slowly die in London.
Instead of a bus like the old Routmaster - which I’m told you could fix
with a spanner and a host of inter-changeable parts - we have a bus
full of ‘uniqueness’.
This country has a highly developed bus market in which bus operators
compete for contracts and purchase their buses from a large pool of bus
manufacturers. Boris has now bucked the market and set up a monopoly in
which he tells operators to use the bus he personally favours.
Londoners are shouldering all the costs and risks of this venture.
Fares will rise because of the £37 million a year bill for the extra
staff who have to be present when the rear door is open. Fares will also
rise to cover the cost of a bus that is bought at a premium from a
monopoly supplier and which TfL can’t sell on. Any additional insurance
costs (due to the open rear door) will also be covered by TfL within the
price of the contract.
A big selling point of the new bus has been its environmental
credentials. I have raised doubts about the environmental claims made by
the Mayor. I have accepted the Mayor’s claim it is more fuel efficient
that the average new bus and has lower emissions, but it is only
marginally better than other new hybrid buses which are starting to roll
off production lines.
The thing is technology is improving all the time and TfL are
constantly raising the environmental bar on what they expect from new
buses. We are only a short while away from all new buses being
cleaner than the Mayor’s New Bus for London and it is even conceivable
London will follow the path of other European cities and switch to all
electric buses.
London’s bus contracts are on a five-year cycle and this enables TfL
to constantly tighten the standards. That is why London bus operators
resell their older out of date buses to places like Bournemouth. The
problem for the New Bus for London is it is spending the whole of its
‘economic life in London’. I worry that in 14 years time it will be old
and outdated compared to every other vehicle in the London bus fleet,
but Bournemouth won’t be a retirement option for this bus. Instead it
will be heading straight to the scrap yard.
Finally, there is the problem of TfL spending £160m of its capital budget on the new bus,
rather than the operators making the purchase as part of the normal contractual arrangement.
This figure has appeared in the Standard and on BBC, but it has been my
own unofficial estimate based upon the Mayor keeping his promise that
the new bus (bought from a monopoly supplier) will cost no more than a
standard hybrid bus.
Whatever the price, the real problem is that this money could have
been used by the Mayor to stick to his commitment that all new buses
would be low-polluting hybrid buses from 2012 onwards. Instead of 600
low-polluting uniquely designed buses by 2016 we could have had
thousands of the ordinary low-polluting kind.
The Mayor has wasted another opportunity to improve London’s chronic air pollution problem.
Darren Johnson Green AM
