There’s another document in the Boriswatch in-tray this evening, namely a report from TfL of the bendy bus replacement consultations undertaken, and the news is not good for Boris, in fact it’s seriously embarrassing. Not only is debendifications bad for the bank balance, it’s in direct opposition to the expressed views of the boroughs on the route, contrary to Boris’s professed intention of working better with the boroughs.
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Department of How Did I Miss That calling. There’s a TfL document (presumably rather well hidden since I haven’t seen it before) detailing the tender costs for the 38, 507 and 521 routes. This means we can finally put a true cost on the Boris Bendy Premium and nail Gilligan to the floor again. Remember, the Great Journalist thinks that bendy operation costs more, as he says:
Each bendy route was competitively tendered; each operator was also asked to tender for operating it with double-deckers; and the tender results, published on the TfL website, show that the bids to run the routes with bendies were in every single case higher, sometimes by seven figures.
One bendy route alone, the 29, is costing us £1.6 million a year more than it would have done to keep double-deckers. Collectively, the double-deck routes converted to bendies are costing about five per cent more in their new guise.
Boris is fond of making comments about ‘Pyong-Yang’, ‘Stalinists’ and ‘Tractor Factories’, so I’d like to draw his attention to an excellent rebuttal of this cheap and boringly familiar rhetorical device by a member of his own party, Councillor Paul Lynch (Chiswick Riverside Ward), responding to complaints about the part-closure of Chiswick House grounds recently:
A properly Stalinist approach would surely have been to close the park completely, without notice, never reopen it, and shoot anyone who complained. I cannot recall an instance of Stalin authorising the refurbishment of an historic park for the benefit of ordinary people. He did gain a certain notoriety for having Magnetogorsk connected to the national grid as the Civil War raged about the town, but that may be apochryphal. Saul or some other expert on Stalin may wish to correct me on that, it is not really my field. As a Conservative I have always approached matters in a more inclusive and consultative way, and very, very seldom have class enemies liquidated.
I like the tone of that, personally. Accusations of ‘Nazi’ or ‘Stalinist’ are flung around far too often for my liking, often deliberately to inflame and obscure an argument. Nice to see a politician taking it in on in an interesting way.
From here…
Normal service will resume later today…or maybe tomorrow…sometime soon, anyway (note to self: never become a journalist).
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Highly encouraging development, since it means I can be lazy this month - London Reconnections is examining the Mayoral Answers for December, which must therefore presumably be out.
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A happy Christmas to all of our readers. May it be sweet, merry and wholly unironic.
We’ll leave you with a rather touching video of Boris lighting the Menorah at the Chanukah celebrations in Trafalgar Square…
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Notorious dieselhead Captain Deltic has fired a warning shot in the direction of Boris, Peter Hendy and TfL over the Routemaster policy:
It’s always fatal to give engineers too much time. Britain’s best train ever, the iconic IC125 was conceived by engineers who saw an urgent commercial requirement for a next generation high speed train and wanted to get on with it.
The Chief Engineer’s proposal went to the British Railways Board in February 1970: £70,000 was allocated for development of the concept at the May 1970 board meeting. At the August 1970 Board Meeting this was replaced by authorisation tof £800,000 to build a prototype. The prototype rolled out in June 1972. A year was lost due to union problems with the single seat cab, but test running started in June 1973. Production followed and the World’s first 125mile/h diesel train service opened in October 1976. And these were the fastest trains in the world apart from the Japanese shinkansen
So how on earth could it take 20 years to develop something simple like a bus?
There’s a wider issue here around how you avoid expensive bad design. It’s also an opportunity to air some of my beliefs and prejudices in the direction of one of my (and not just me, actually) favourite writers, if he isn’t up to his elbows in grease in a garage somewhere.
Hendy’s actually talking about periods of occasional development over a two decades, up until the last bus rolled off the line in 1968. The gestation of the RM was actually extremely long from requirement to service (then again, the Austerity years weren’t exactly easy for product development), but after that they basically built one version in large numbers, then built a slightly longer one in rather smaller numbers, with various minor upgrades along the way and a couple of derivatives built in tiny numbers.
[In railway terms the Mk.1 coach is the comparison rather than the HST, since again they were building variations on a flexible theme over two decades or so. The Mk.1 is of course also an iconic design dating from the 1950s that went out of service due to healthnsafety in 2005 (yes, I was on one of the tours). I'm not sure that's a reason to bring it back though]
Controversial moment, and I may incur the Curse of Captain Deltic here - to me the Deltic suffered from the Concorde problem of being too radical with too much new stuff at once, resulting in a product of huge notional capability that in practice was expensive to operate and unreliable and didn’t sell.
T.C.B. Miller’s genius was to take the concept forward in a pragmatic way through a number of not particularly revolutionary moves that together added up to an answer to all the problems:- split the engines into two cars for resiliency and to provide more breathing space, put the cars at each end to save light engine moves and thus reduce costs, add 33% more powered wheels for traction and do the really clever thing with the electrically signalled brakes to allow higher speeds.
The result was a much better product built in much more economical quantities capable of proper evolution (the Deltic ETH system must be a candidate for worst bit of railway engineering, surely? On the other hand, the HST seems to be able to swallow different people’s engines almost willy-nilly). My most comfortable rail journey this year was down to Swansea and back in a refurbished FGW HST. It’s just so relaxing in there.
I suspect what we’re both getting at here is what I call the Theory of Artistic Limitation, which runs basically ‘the more resources you give someone the less creative the results’ (I believe this to be an isotope of the oft-repeated railway phrase ‘engineers should be on tap but not on top’). There need to be conflicting requirements, since engineers are at their best when trying to find the best compromise solution, since it allows iterative design to proceed faster (in the case of the IC125 it was ‘fastest train you can get for chump change in the shortest time’, which instantly precluded any time-wasting fantasies about tilt or gas turbines or ‘hey, what about using the same train to run to Edinburgh and East Grinstead’ or similar).
It’s partly because I can’t see what the conflicting requirements are for the neo-RM (cost? capacity? timescales?) but I can clearly see them for the bendy bus that I think the latter is better engineering. I suppose I’m biased towards solutions that emerge from expert compromise rather than embodying someone’s leadership. The genius lies not in the leader (have you seen our leaders? Exactly.) but in adequate stupidity filters being in place to let the good ideas through and exclude the bad ones. Peter Hendy and his team are Boris’s stupidity filter and since Boris’s public competition is essentially a flytrap for stupid ideas they’re need if we’re to have a fighting chance of stupidity being discarded before they do too much damage. Otherwise we’ll get things like leather seats, solar panels and moving advertising hoardings wasting everyone’s time and money. Note that the mainstream press focus exclusively on the frills, which is why a bus designed by journalists is my idea of hell.
Phew. I notice the latest Modern Railways has just hit the mat, so I’m going shopping. I’ll read it on the bus.
Tags: captain deltic · engineering · philosophy2 Comments
Two more articles - first Pro London cover the matter here, while Andrew Gilligan displays his big worry - that his arch-nemesis Peter Hendy and his evil Ken-worshipping coven will undermine Boris’s wonderful Routemaster with their sordid attempts to run London’s transport professionally for its users:
I know your game, Mr Hendy
Ominous, little-noticed words from the head of TfL, Peter Hendy, amid the euphoria of the new Routemaster designs last week. “The Routemaster is so good because it was developed over two decades,” he said. “What we should aim to create now is not just a Routemaster replacement, but a whole new generation of London buses that could affect the future of the entire industry. You can’t rush that … What we might end up with is something more radical than anyone has yet proposed.” Translation: “I’m going to try to string this process along until long after Boris has left office, run out of money or lost interest, and it’s going to be gradually watered down over that time until it looks like what I and my fellow bureaucrats want. You know what, how about a long, single-decker bus with a concertina-type bit in the middle?” I know what your game is, Peter — in fact, the development of the Routemaster took nothing like “two decades” — and I’ll be watching.
Ooeerr, scary. What’ll you do, Andy, misquote them until they go away?
The two decades quote is interesting though, since Pro London picked up on it. It was reported in Jonathan Glancey’s article here. The full quote, which as usual Gilligan snipped to put his spin on it, was:
The Routemaster was so good,” says Hendy, “because it was developed over two decades. Specifications for the bus were drawn up in 1946, the first prototype was unveiled in 1954 and production models began regular work five years later.
Add in that the lengthened RML became the standard design after 1965 and a single front-door prototype was built in 1966 and you’ve got 20 years development from clean sheet of paper to first roll-out of the final version. I’d say Peter Hendy’s case pretty much stands up here and Gilligan looks a twerp again for misquoting someone. Hendy also sounds a lot more sensible than either Boris or Gilligan, since he recognises the importance of evolution and progressive improvement in design and understands that the state can have an active, but not controlling, role in this (after all, the bus builders have to make buses for other people, too, in a global market). Particularly given the hybrid drive decision, not allowing the design to evolve risks missing the point completely - instead of something radical (or useful) you end up with the Betamax Bus - hybrid drive systems are in the constantly-evolving phase. There’s another quote about the engineering being more important than conductors, too, which suggests that Mr. Common Sense is still at home.
Of course, if you take now as 1946, the first prototype wasn’t on the streets until eight years later, which would be 2016, with route conversion in about 2019. Cripes! Boris will be Prime Minister by then, probably launching a competition to design a new dreadnought, or something.
What Gilligan will never admit is that he needs Peter Hendy if the RM is to get anywhere. That’s got to hurt. I wonder if they’ll publish my comment this time.
Tags: Gilligan · hendy · Routemaster5 Comments
We occasionally like to go back and revisit old posts, and there’s an opportunity here to put some facts around the bendy replacement timetable, particularly the PVR increase and the stated 2011 date for the Routemaster. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that 31/12/2011 counts here, as two years from OJEU notice (due next month) to rollout of a vehicle full of untried technology is ridiculous. So what do we have?
Route Tender 5 5+ Old PVR New PVR
507 1-Jun-2002 1-Jun-2007 1-Jun-2009 9 15
521 1-Jun-2002 1-Jun-2007 1-Jun-2009 19 32
38 20-Jul-2002 20-Jul-2007 20-Jul-2009 47 72
18 23-Aug-2003 23-Aug-2008 23-Aug-2010 32 49
149 18-Oct-2003 18-Oct-2008 18-Oct-2010 27 41
73 1-May-2004 1-May-2009 1-May-2011 43 66
25 26-Jun-2004 26-Jun-2009 26-Jun-2011 43 66
12 31-Jul-2004 31-Jul-2009 31-Jul-2011 31 47
207 9-Apr-2005 9-Apr-2010 9-Apr-2012 27 41
29 14-Jan-2006 14-Jan-2011 14-Jan-2013 29 44
436 9-Feb-2008 9-Feb-2013 9-Feb-2015 26 40
453 16-Feb-2008 16-Feb-2013 16-Feb-2015 23 35
Old PVR Total: 356 New PVR Total: 549
So that’s nearly 200 more buses to provide no capacity increase, most of which will be bog-standard conventional double deckers, since their routes will debendify long before the Routemaster.
On the Routemaster issue, it’s obvious that no routes expire at a convenient time - the only candidate for early introduction would be the 207 in April 2012. The previous two debendifications in June and July 2011 are way too early given the large number of buses required and that the tenders would be assessed in late 2010, long before series production would be underway. April 2012 is still tight, though, for nearly 50 new design buses and a radical change from frequent bendies to open platform RMs on one of London’s busiest routes just before the Mayoral election and the Olympics (although these are the other side of town). The 207 is also entirely outside central London on a route that the bendy myths have even less traction than usual on (it’s wide and mostly straight). The temptation must be to delay until the autumn.
I’ll therefore stick my neck out and say that no bendy route will be directly replaced by Routemasters in this Mayoral term. There may be a normal double deck route that’s suitable, but that lacks the symbolism, wasn’t in the manifesto, doesn’t allow the use of bendy myths as justification and is open to serious criticism on cost grounds. If the double deckers are coping fine, why replace them with costlier RMs?
Oh, and the total PVR estimate looks familiar - I’m sure there were some figures on bendy replacement cost flying around at the election. Let’s see if they stand up seven months on:
First Ken Livingstone, who claimed 620. Slightly high, but his figures for bendies was slightly high and he assumed the 507/521 would be replaced with RMs.
Next, TfL, in the famous spat over ‘Ken-friendly’ figures which ended up with egg all over Boris. Their figures are more nuanced and estimated 560 buses required for service out of a fleet of 620. I’d say that was pretty good as an estimate in the heat of the moment. Given that, it’s worth keeping an eye on the rest of their analysis, as the basic assumptions look sound:
Such an enlarged fleet would mean taking on still more conductors as well as additional drivers. TfL estimated that a total of 1,736 conductors would have to be hired at around £28,000 per year if add-ons such as national insurance and pensions were included, together with an extra 651 drivers at £35,000 per year making staffing a new Routemaster fleet cost at least £72m more than the present fleet of bendy buses.
It also theorised that the cost of new buses would be £40m a year, meaning that Johnson’s scheme would cost £112m in all.
It’s also worth recalling Boris’s answer:
It’s perfectly true there is a dispute between myself and the mayor about the cost of getting conductors once again on the 337 new Routemasters that we will be introducing to replace the bendy bus, and the mayor says that it is ten times our calculated cost of eight million pounds a year. I haven’t seen the mayor’s figures, I don’t know quite how he arrives at that statistic. I am told that it would only cost eight million pounds.
I’d say that Boris has already moved sharply away from his original policy, in the expensive direction - there will not be 337 new Routemasters (by the timetable, over 70% of the bendy replacements need to be in service before the first feasible RM-replaces-bendy day in April 2012) and the cost will not be £8m. This is because his original policy made no sense at all, as TfL presumably told him shortly after the election. I think that, since their analysis has now been provided to both parties and turns out to be correct, we can stop the accusations of political bias and instead start asking why Boris was so off the money originally. If anything, TfL are rescuing Boris from the consequences of his own ignorance during the campaign. I wonder if anyone knows any sad individuals who are still indulging in such behaviour?
Tags: capacity · cost · Routemaster · timetable2 Comments
Bus and Coach is a magazine. They have a website. The website has a story about the Routemaster competition. Here’s a sample:
Perhaps we should be thankful that his nostalgia trip only took him back to the 1950s, and we’re not seeing the re-invention of the eco-friendly low-pollution horse bus.
You can read the rest here. No, it doesn’t get any more complimentary.
Tags: busandcoach · Routemaster3 Comments