This is a load of specious nonsense.

The Mayor does not ‘buy’ buses. Buses are bought by private operating companies who bid for route franchises.

However, Boris did put in £11m seed money to cover the design and prototypes of the new Routemaster (fulfilling a manifesto pledge).

Let’s see that in context:

When he was Mayor, Ken spent £11m refurbishing Finsbury Park station, replacing the CCTV cameras, upgrading the lighting and adding an eye-catching canopy.

So what’s the better deal? Creating permanent jobs in an innovative British company + getting a a new bus of the sort Londoner’s actually want that is also greener & more reliable?

Or doing a largely cosmetic refurb on one Tube station?

Pull the other one, Mr Lammy.

I think we’ve been over this before. The buses are expensive when only a few have been built, but by the time they have been rolled out to a greater usage they are not going to be any more expensive than any other bus – indeed 11m to design and build a new vehicle is *incredibly* cheap.

What Lammy is doing is the typical twisting of the truth and saying the whole cost of developement and production. Dividing 11m by 8. By that logic only about 50 need to be built for them to be roughly the same cost as a normal double decker.

And do remember why these buses exist – to replace Ken’s bendy buses which were expensive, unreliable, unsuited to London roads and enabled higher levels of fare dodging.

What a stupid comparison.
The BMW that David Lammy wants to buy won’t be used by hundreds of people every day.

Lawks!

Two things:

As mentioned above, and in probably every single news story about the buses, the cost of the prototypes is not the cost of the final products.

Secondly, and as a politician, Mr Lammy should understand this (and it is alarming if he doesn’t), but Boris was elected on a mandate to scrap the bendy buses and bring in double-deckers.

I am sure Mr Lammy would be all too keen to castigate the Mayor had he been elected on a mandate to do something, then decided not to do it.

The buses aren’t the waste here, its the petulant letter the MP has just written.

Did these same people complain when Ken was spending similar figures on fuel cell prototypes on the RV1 route?

And are they really only going to make 8 of them? Why?

@ 2

What Lammy is doing is the typical twisting of the truth..

Quite so.

Childish politics.

Perhaps he should give himself a smack?

Even the Guardian are on the right side of this debate.

Only eight of these buses will be in operation by the summer time. With an overall budget of £8m, the tabloid press is predictably whingeing about them costing £1m each. The other way of looking at it is that, amazingly, Transport for London is investing money in research and development instead of just taking whatever manufacturers give them. From here on, it won’t cost much more to build one of this new breed than it does to build a boxy competitor. Whether or not the order is given to put them into production will come down to politics. In May we may have a new mayor and a new agenda. If Ken Livingstone wins, he shouldn’t write this off as one of Boris’s whims but embrace it as an investment in the daily life of Londoners.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/feb/23/routemaster-london-bus-new

@Tyler #2:

I think we’ve been over this before. The buses are expensive when only a few have been built, but by the time they have been rolled out to a greater usage they are not going to be any more expensive than any other bus

They are:

http://liberalconspiracy.org/2011/12/09/boris-launches-worlds-most-expensive-bus/#comment-339169

I never got an answer to the question.

Robin, in that thread, pointed out that the bus is actually not as good as the existing designs for the disabled.

Since the design is less accessible to the disabled, and indeed carries fewer passengers than the buses it replaces, I can’t see that anyone else will buy one.

Even the Grauniad story cited above, by the way, comments that the bus is more expensive than the other designs – unless the meaning of “it won’t cost much more” varies with the idology of the speaker.

Something is odd. The new Routemaster buses require a two-man crew if the hop-on option applies but Boris has been mooting the option of driverless trains on the Tube. Strange that.

I’m with those who aren’t greatly enamoured with this bus, ‘open’ platform, what’s that about ? However as everyone else is pointing out this is just silly partisan nonsense. Sums up Labour really, don’t bother with the effort of criticising constructively and effectively. just rant and everyone is bound to vote for us.

@10: “‘open’ platform, what’s that about ? ”

With the old Routemaster buses in London, boarding the bus was by an open platform at the rear so wannabe passengers could (and did) chase after buses and jump on moving buses – or passengers could jump off between stops if that was more convenient. These open platform buses had to have a conductor, whose job it was to colllect fares, as well as a driver. Fare dodging was easier with open platform buses.

The newer buses, currently in use, have doors at the front and in the middle to control boarding and alighting and only have one-man crews, the driver, who collects the money fares from passengers or supervises electronic payment by Oyster cards. There is a significant discount on fares paid by Oyster cards.

The higher cost of the new Routemaster buses compared with the cost of regular doubledecker buses (£190,000, as quoted) is surely impressive and that cost will have to be met from fares or through subsidies.

Ahh, I love the sound of whining from right-wingers when trying to justify public sector over-spend when their man is in power.

@4

Boris was elected on a mandate to scrap the bendy buses and bring in double-deckers.

Balderdash. His majority was wafer-thin and consisted largely of people from the outer boroughs, where articulated buses were something of a rarity. It was a distraction point and nothing more – what got Boris elected was going round staunchly Tory boroughs like Bexley and claiming that Ken Livingstone was ignoring their needs.

@Bob B
Yes I know what an open platform is , I was being sarcastic. I actually know a bit about buses being a transport nerd and former conductor myself and an open platform is an outdated concept, it largely disappeared from new buses after about 1960. The RM was originally designed in the early fifties and in production until the late sixties so, with its forerunner the RT, the open platform remained much commoner in London than most other places. Going back to it is just nostalgia, it probably won’t be in use most of the time thus creating dead space and it will only take one accident in these safety conscious days to see it not used at all.
@Sunny Hundal
This ‘right winger’ doesn’t have any time for pointless public spending whatever its origins.

The origin of the old Routemasters was a great deal younger than I am so I’m thoroughly familiar with their advantages and drawbacks – I can recall times when doubledecker buses still had stairways to the upper decks running on the outside at the rear.

As a dependent user of public transport again, I really can’t see any important benefits from use of Boris’s new Routemasters on outer London routes. By accounts, these new buses will be significantly more costly to buy and to operate with two-man crews than with current regular doubledecker buses. Someone is going to have to pay for all that somehow. The fairest way would be suitably premium fares on the new Routemasters to reflect their high cost.

Personally, I not surprised about this since I’ve long regarded Boris as a complete buffoon – this simply confirms that prior assessment.

8 buses in 7000 at that rate are buses will cost more then the national debt

There’s something really wrong here. Is this just a spin contest?
Where, to try to get things clarified or to criticise Lammy just gets you dismissed as a ”right winger”? It’s the kind of thing that whould put you off politics and just not bother.

Surely Lammy is obfuscating and being disingenuous with his ”open letter”. No?

And the line about Johnson not working ”full-time” because he writes a Telegraph column is really taking the mickey. Unless it’s a joke. The column would take him only half an hour to knock out.

If Ken is elected, there will only be eight of these buses, because they are utterly useless for London’s needs. If Boris is re-elected, there will sadly probably be more than eight of them.

Creating permanent jobs in an innovative British company + getting a a new bus of the sort Londoner’s actually want that is also greener & more reliable?

…is ridiculous. The difference between the BorisBus and other modern hybrid double-deckers already being produced by successful British companies (Alexander Dennis and Wrightbus) is that it weighs more per seat, costs more per seat, requires two staff members instead of one, and can’t be exported (the asymmetric design means that a LHD version would cost almost as much to introduce as the original platform, Hong Kong is the only RHD market for double deckers, and the BorisBus isn’t designed to incorporate aircon).

The fact is, Lamy is right to say Boris has wasted GBP11m on eight prototype buses that are inferior to the buses already produced by private, for-profit British businesses. If he’d instead spent the money on 30 of these, Londoners and British industry would have been far better off. And that’s *even if we allow the assumption* that axing the bendies was the right approach in the first place.

It’s almost as if state micromanagement were a crap way to run manufacturing industry, compared with providing top-level specs to commercial businesses. Funny the way right-wing commentators forget about that when it’s their man doing the micromanaging, nah?

It probably is a waste of money.

On the other hand I am rather looking forward to hopping on and off again.
Though apparently not after 7pm…d’oh.

It would have been far better of course had Livingstone not broken his promise not to scrap the original Routemasters.

It would have been far better of course had Livingstone not broken his promise not to scrap the original Routemasters.

Far better in the sense of terrible reliability, terrible safety record, poor emissions, low passenger capacity and still requiring two-man operation, presumably. An excellent and popular sense of the term.

Routemasters weren’t scrapped at the end of their design lives, because cash ticket sales on one-person-operated double deckers didn’t have the necessary passenger throughput to avoid causing terrible congestion at bus stops on crowded central London routes. Oyster, when combined with peak-time bans on selling cash fares on board, solves this problem.

@john b

You’re quite right about the ‘new Routemaster’ but that kind of analysis isn’t really wanted by either side in the Boris/Ken slugfest, the problem here is that neither the pro or anti Boris camp know or care much about public transport, which is where my criticism of Lammy comes from, I don’t think he’s interested in whether this a good cost effective vehicle or not. Actually how right wing is Boris anyway ? Depends on your definition of right wing I suppose, I certainly wouldn’t see him as much of a friend of small government.

Agree with all the pro-Routemaster views on here. It’s the only good thing Boris has done for London and I hope when Livingstone gets back in he has the sense to roll out a full fleet.

The letter by Lammy was truly awful and brings ”politics” into disrepute.
Is this the idea that Lammy wants to become lodged in people’s heads – that the buses will cost £1.4 million per bus, compared to under £200,000 for existing double deckers?
It’s pretty underhand by any standards. Maybe not as bad as the ”Boris is a racist” campaign of last time, but still getting pretty close to the gutter.

£11 million is hardly a great deal of money anyway, It’s an R&D cost. That is normal if we want inovation and better design as we go forward into the future.
Tower Hamlets has a budget of £1 billion. Boroughs are being asked to stump up £2 million just to have the Boris bikes expand into their borough.
Maybe it would have been better to buy some new buses off the peg from somewhere else. Are the existing ones that bad anyway? But these are all bus questions, and what Lammy is doing is blatant mischief making. It makes him look untrustworthy.

Dave Hill has been following the bus story closer than probably anyone here, and in his latest post on it the other day he says that he has been ”generally supportive”.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/davehillblog/2012/feb/27/boris-johnson-new-london-bus-first-passenger-day

That’s good enough for me. The rest (from Lammy) is naked spinning.

@damon #23:

Dave Hill has been following the bus story closer than probably anyone here, and in his latest post on it the other day he says that he has been ”generally supportive”.

That’s not quite the whole truth – he said immediately before that:

“It’s too early to judge if the new bus has been worth the time and expense, vanity project or not.”

More generally, the actual cost, based upon the production run of 600 mooted, is over £350,000 – still well over the cost of diesels, and 20+% more than the cost of better designed, higher passenger capacity off the shelf hybrids.

£11 million is hardly a great deal of money anyway, It’s an R&D cost. That is normal if we want inovation and better design as we go forward into the future.

But it’s not a better design; it’s heavier per passenger, has less capacity, and is less accessible for the disabled and those with pushchairs than existing designs.

Robin Levett, I don’t have a problem with any of your points.
The bus may end up not being the best design or give the best value. We’ll see.
It may well end up being Johnson’s vanity project.
But what David Lammy is doing is the cheapest of politicking. He’s just spinning and taking the public for fools. Because that’s not the way to help further informed debate and undersatnding.

As for the open platforms on the bus, I can’t see how that will work in the modern era.
Once you’ve got accidents with people crashing into cyclists and rowdy groups of youths piling on and off between stops.

@damn #25:

As for the open platforms on the bus, I can’t see how that will work in the modern era.

But that was the key design criterion…

As for the spinning; the reason it works is because Boris can’t say “but it only costs £X on the basis of a production run of Y”; because on the likely maximum value of Y, £X is more than 20% above the cost of apparently better off-the-shelf designs. It might be politicking, but unusually it contains a massive dollop of truth.

But that was the key design criterion…

I know. There are just so many parts of London where an open platform and a bus conductor would not be suitable. Is the conductor meant to ”police” the bus?
They’ll have to be wearing stab vests then. The first time a conductor gets asaulted or robbed it could be deemed too dangerous.