21 April 2016
Smelly Reds
by J.R.Thomas
They are red, some of them stink, and they are everywhere. Now, the Shaw Sheet never sinks to sheer vulgar abuse, but we do ask you to consider our analysis of the red menace in London. Ken Livingstone started it. Well, it was long before him really, but he somehow made it much worse, with those bendy buses. Jamming the streets, scraping cars, shoving cyclists, catching fire in the rush hours. Boris solved that, with his nice new retro buses, the second generation Routemasters, designed by celeb designer Thomas Heatherwick and built in Ballymena. There are nearly one thousand of them now, most stuck in a traffic snarl-up on Ludgate Hill. Boiling their passengers and belching out diesel fumes.
London is ever more densely inhabited, drawing in more and more workers from further and further afield; so, not surprisingly, politicians have grappled for years with the problem of how to move all those people about and prevent London completely gumming up. The policy has never deviated much from two core strategies. Firstly, deter drivers from bringing their cars into London; and secondly, very much secondly, improve public transport.
The first has been running in a low key way for years – reduce the amount of parking, make it much more expensive, deliberately introduce congestion at key pinch points around London to deter drivers from driving in, create dedicated and exclusive bus lanes . Ken Livingstone took one giant step by trying to stop poor people driving in (he didn’t put it like that but it was the effect) by the introducing the Congestion Charge, a fee to enter central London using camera technology to efficiently collect the charges. It worked pretty well – volumes dropped, congestion eased (the triumph slightly dulled by the revelation that Ken had, allegedly, made congestion worse before the charge was introduced by manipulating the traffic lights; on the day of the charge introduction they were all reset to the most flow efficient settings). Ken also created Transport for London, (“TfL”) a London-wide manager of London’s transport systems which is regulator of everything that goes on, and operates the roads, the Underground, and soon the Overground, if it gets its way.
TfL has continued that process of trying to squeeze out the motorist, its latest wheeze being to introduce dedicated bicycle lanes – desperately needed, as London’s daily bike usage is said to have gone up by three times in the past five years. TfL also encouraged more bus provision and continued the slow and disruptive refurbishment of London’s Underground railway. The brand new semi-express Crossrail underground line will open next year, and planning is now in course for a similar venture roughly north-south. Public transport is the future for overcrowded London; and is hard to see what alternative there could be, at least until we can all be teleported around or carried by drones
There is a class (or more correctly, wealth) angle to all this. It is not just red buses jamming up Ludgate Hill; they are interspersed with black limos, mostly built in Germany, with blacked out rear windows and a quietly blue suited driver on his own in the front. Also hopping in and out of the bus lanes are taxis – the old fashioned black cabs – doing battle with their new worst nightmares, Uber cars, mainly Toyota Priuses, the mobile phone friendly high tech self-driver fleet which is now said to have more than 50,000 cars cruising for hire in London. Add a few white vans and lorry loads of steel going to construction sites in the City and private motorists are almost as rare as ospreys in central London.
Which is starting to cause problems. First, and least important, by one of those wonderful mutations of policy leading to unintended consequences, a large proportion of the occupants of smaller vehicles in central London are rich people, been driven round by other people. But the bigger problem is the one of pollution. The original reason for the Congestion Charge was to try to cut pollution in central London, by speeding up journey times, reducing idling times in traffic jams and at lights, and generally keeping everything fluid and moving.
TfL has largely focussed not on making public transport more attractive, but making the private car less so. This, it hopes, will get people on their feet, or their bikes, or on buses, or, if they must, on the tube. The reluctance to push more travellers onto the tube being because it is already reaching peak capacity, and beyond, at the rush hours and in some key stations such as Oxford Circus and Victoria. The large backlog of repairs – railway management in the UK always seems to prefer buying new trains and kit rather than maintaining the old – also suggests that capacity limitations will linger much longer yet, in spite of the opening of Crossrail and possible construction of Crossrail 2.
So the bus that must take the strain for a long time to come. But the public are not so keen on buses, given a choice. Buses are slow, stop too often, or not often enough, depending where you want to get on or off. They are too hot/cold/damp/smelly/crowded (select any and add your own dislike). The seats are too narrow, the leg room too restricted. They remain very difficult for the less abled, for those with buggies, for those carrying shopping. Bus routes are obscure and for journeys requiring a change of route, a standard fixed fare is charged each time you change bus.
And they are major polluters. “What?!” you cry. Oh yes; even the new Boris eco-retro-freedom-to-hop-on bus is not as environmentally friendly as sold in the original concept. Those electric engines are powered by diesel generators under the rear seats; the old fleet is still a fume belcher, and even the new generation of electric hydro buses (precious few of them anyway) are really only transferring pollution from The Strand to power stations in the north. The approved tale is that buses are very efficient in terms of keeping London’s atmosphere breathable. And that would be true if buses proceeded elegantly along, stopping rarely and certainly only at TfL approved stops, and were full of travellers at all times.
But, of course, that is not what goes on in real life. Buses are forever stopping and then powering up to pull away, slowing and accelerating, and most of the day they are doing this with surprisingly few passengers on board.
The Alliance of British Drivers (you may think this lobby group is not entirely disinterested, and you are right, but bear with us) asked various local authorities to provide loading figures for their buses. Only two did so, but the ABD was able by simple observation to compile its own figures. It then worked out the emissions (nearly all diesel), per bus, calculated and presented per passenger mile. The calculations show that, except in the rush hour, buses emit around three times the emission per passenger head in cars. And buses come off even worse if the car is powered by petrol, as many are; to say nothing of those cars with electrical assistance. Even the latest diesel powered buses emit around eight times a diesel cars’ particles – the black smoky stuff that does you no good.
Cars are usually only driven when the driver wants to go somewhere. Buses have to stick to timetables and must drive around even when mostly empty. And buses tend to last a long time, and that means a lot of them are using much older technology, and harming the very environment we should like them to help save.
No doubt, as technology gallops on, future generations of buses will be much more efficient; or will be replaced by trams or even a version of the trolley bus, buses that ran on electrical power drawn from cables strung in the streets. Future electric buses will no doubt run off battery packs, and London streets will be that much cleaner by virtue of wind or nuclear power. But in the meantime, as you glare at that massive Mercedes edging past you with the mystery of the back seat insoluble; remember: whoever he is, he may well be better for the environment than you are.
Please click here if you would like a weekly email on publication of the Shaw Sheet
