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And how is it now - how often do people have to stand in public transport vehicles in London?
Not so comfortable now - although the Citaro artics are being replaced with buses with more seats. On the Tube, you almost always have to stand, though.
Yes - the Citaros are hated by everyone. They're too long for London streets. Also, many people don't pay to travel.
I promised not to take this one up with you Dave, but still... The high rates of fare evasion are down to inadequate revenue controls - any Polish copper will tell you how useful these are when in the business of rooting out small-time criminals, yet there is hardly any revenue control on London Buses, probably due to a lack of resources within the Met. I will agree with you that the bendies were a tad inadequate for the tight street layouts within the city and the West End, but a lot of that was down to lines painted in the wrong places - the traffic lights on Shaftesbury Avenue at the exit of Piccadilly Circus are a prime example. Then again, other places in Europe had to repaint a few lines when introducing bendies as well - London never bothered. Still, while perhaps the 25 or the 453 are constrained by problematic road layouts, I fail to see where the bendies could cause any problems whatsoever on routes such as the 18 or the 207, which are effectively straight routes along long avenues. You could find plenty of such busy, straight-line routes at the edge of zone 1 and further out, where the bendies would not pose any significant traffic issues, but would bring more SPACES (in the AM peak people don't care about seats on buses, believe me) on the bus and at a lower cost than what is today happening to the 38 or the Red Arrows.
Hi straphan. I am in limited agreement with some of what you say, but I still thing they're an abomination. Simply putting on more buses is probably a better way of soaking up the crowds!
Dave, I'm afraid that you're peddling what I would call Ukrainian transport philosophy. What is the best way of transporting 10000 people per hour per direction? A bendy is the obvious answer in terms of overall costs: fewer vehicles take up less space on the road, they cost less (staff + fuel + maintenance + stabling space), and they have faster boarding times. Sadly, they have a few seats less - which nobody cares about at 8am during the week anyway. For the sake of what I think is a wrong definition of passenger comfort, you choose double deckers, which are slower, costlier, take up more road space, but have more seats. Ukrainians have a similar point of view, which is why they prefer minibuses to trams and trolleys - even though road congestion in most big cities is by now caused mainly by minibuses... Curbing the strive for passenger comfort in urban buses is more beneficial on the whole, even if possibly slightly detrimental to the passengers themselves.