I would invite tenders to design and build a new Routemaster bus for London. Based on the original design, I would reintroduce a bus with an open platform at the rear and the presence of a conductor to collect fares. The platform would allow large volumes of passengers to alight and board quickly at stops, and indeed at traffic lights and slow speeds. The conductor would collect fares whilst the bus travelled, thus minimising delays at stops.
The bus would also incorporate environmental features making it suitable for the 21st century.
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Will you provide an incentive for bus companies to use this sort of bus, or will you rely on them choosing it voluntarily?
I don't think you should force the bus companies to use Routemaster 2. In fact, I don't even think you need to incentivise them: the proposition would be so good, they would choose it voluntarily!
the proposition would be so good, they would choose it voluntarily!
In which case, why would you need to organise for it to be designed and built? If there is strong demand requiring no additional incentive, the market should provide it without political intervention. This shouldn't be a policy proposal, this should be a proposal to bus manufacturers or financiers.
Possibly as a result of a fractured bus industry. For the same reason rail companies choose different manufacturers to supply their rolling stock.
The DfT is looking at a proposal for an HST2, an updated design playing to the strengths of the original High Speed Train designed 30 years ago. By identifying the specifications and guaranteeing a certain number of orders, they believe manufacturers will be interested.
Why not centrally develop a specification for a Routemaster 2, back platform and all, and discuss with the bus operators their interest. The incentive? More operators on board, the lower the unit cost.
There is a particular reason for the government to get involved in railway rolling-stock - the combination of medium-term licences that may not be renewed (as you observed on your other blog recently for Virgin, or for Connex a little longer ago) and high capital costs of equipment. It's a lousy structure, but a good reason for intervention, given the lousy structure.
Whether a bus company loses its licence is largely within its own control. Buses are not such a major capital cost, and there is a market into which they can be sold if necessary. Bus companies are more like licensed waste hauliers than rail operators in this regard. I don't think it would be a good idea to get government to come up with an optimal design of skip wagon to ensure standardisation of specification and maximising the number of orders. This is almost a perfect example of a well-meaning proposal for government to intervene, supposedly to offer economic efficiency, but in practice to undermine competition. This is fundamentally antithetical to the notion of free markets.
It's not about whether we should have new Routemasters. I like them better than bendy buses too. It's about whether government should act in certain ways to try to second-guess the market. If Ken or other busy-bodies have introduced rules that skew markets in favour of bendy-buses, then remove those interventions and let operators choose from an unbiased market. But don't introduce a new bias to compensate for an existing one, or for an imagined imperfection in the market. However well-intentioned, the adverse consequences (often described as "unforeseen", though they are more usually ignored than unforeseen) will outweigh any benefits.
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