The Routemaster is history
I heard it reported on the breakfast talk show yesterday (when I was too tired to blog but got up to write them an email) that the Routemaster bus is finally disappearing from the streets of London after fifty years' service. They are now to be used only on two "heritage" routes, which take in Tower Bridge and St Paul's Cathedral, but don't pass Big Ben or Buckingham Palace (so that'll be a success, then). The presenters, like a lot of people, were very sorry to see them go and did not like their replacements at all – and I don't blame them.
The main argument they gave is simply that it "allows them to control their journey" – to get on or off a bus when it's stopped, at a bus stop or otherwise. Because of "safety rules", drivers of one-man buses don't normally open their doors other than at a bus stop, sometimes even when there actually is a bus stop for another route or when the bus is stopped in a traffic jam just yards from the stop. As an adult, I don't particularly like people telling me when I can or can't get off a bus "for my own safety" (read: for insurance purposes). I had enough of this treatment at school from teachers who would not intervene when the danger came from other kids. If there's one thing I despise more than the nanny state, it's the nanny company.
What they are replacing the Routemasters with is, of course, a mixture of new "accessible" double-deckers with high-powered engines and "bendy buses". The latter are commonly known as "free buses" or "happy buses" because the ticket machine is on the pavement and you don't have to pass the driver when you get on, giving the impression of an easy ride for fare dodgers. Being the length of an articulated truck, they are obviously more difficult to drive, although I've not yet had a serious complaint about one of the drivers.
The double-deckers, which are on the majority of London routes, are a different story. Of course, double-decker buses with doors are not new – there were actually Routemasters with doors (called RMCs, Routemaster Coaches), used on the express Green Line buses when there was a huge network of them running right out into the home counties and down to the coast. (Nowadays, it's one of the few brands of the Arriva bus giant that hasn't been renamed "Arriva" and most of the routes have been sold off or removed.) Driver-only buses have been around since the 1960s, and Fleetlines, Atlanteans, Metrobuses and Olympians were actually the majority of the buses I rode on in the 1980s and 1990s. The 68 route, which we used regularly when visiting my grandparents in Dulwich, changed to a one-man bus some time in the 1980s.
The new buses, first introduced around 1999, have gradually replaced the old Olympians on most routes around London (probably in the provinces the old buses are still rolling around – when I was in Aberystwyth, a load of hand-me-down London & Country Olympians, on which I'd ridden to and from sixth-form college a couple of years before, were introduced on Crosville routes there, with the London Transport no-smoking signs still in place). They have low floors and are able to "crouch" when at bus stops to allow an even lower step-up for the passenger; they also have spaces for wheelchairs and pushchairs. But they also have more powerful engines, allowing faster acceleration and faster driving. And this doesn't always make for a better passenger experience.
Today, the BBC reports that complaints about buses have tripled in the last four years, with our own route 152 here in New Malden among the worst four. 80% of the complaints are about driver behaviour: drivers moving off before a passenger has got off or not getting close enough to the kerb for elderly or disabled passengers. Something I've experienced when riding the buses is driver not actually stopping when I want to get on or off, not mentioned in that BBC report – along with drivers being plain rude or arrogant.
The safety arguments hold no water; if they really were dangerous, they would have been replaced decades ago rather than being gradually phased out. The reason they can't simply build more Routemasters – obviously a modern version – appears to be European law, which is notorious for its disconnect from ordinary people (far more even than US federal law), the silly rules it imposes which prevent perfectly good produce from being traded across borders (such as Cretan melons and Madeira bananas) and the insufficiency of some of its codes. The RM has the obvious advantage of the driver being separated from the passengers, so he cannot just slow the bus down by the pavement and expect him to jump on a moving bus; he has to stop, and wait until the conductor rings the bell. Of course, you do need accessible buses, but that doesn't mean those of us who are able-bodied should not be allowed to use our abilities.
