On 17 May, 17:23, Mizter T wrote:
On May 17, 2:38*pm, MIG wrote:





On 17 May, 14:12, Tom Barry wrote:

Mizter T wrote:
to my eyes at least, it does look good

Not to mine - the front is a hideous, bulbous eyed mess and looks like
it's got a black eye, while the back sacrifices the rear window for a
stylistic swoosh. *The sides are OK in a 'just like any modern long
distance coach' way, but who judges a bus by its sides?

What's more important is how big the thing is, looks huge to me. *It
would have to be to fit in 87 seats, three doors and two staircases, mind.

It's not a Routemaster.

Good. *A Routemaster was already retro in the 1950s. *The bendys have
weaned us off filing through a narrow gap past the driver, at the cost
of a ludicrous amount of wasted road space.

The "wasted road space" of which you speak being space used for
passengers actually on the bus - the long single deck and multiple
doors meaning loading and unloading happens quicker thus dwell times
are reduced, making journeys speedier and resulting in fewer actual
vehicles being required.

(I think it was Tom Barry - well it must have been - who attempted to
work out the total road space that would be used by the double-deckers
that replaced the bendies on route 38 - IIRC his calculation was that
they would actually occupy *more* road space.)

But the total area taken up by lots of small vehicles doesn't cause
anything like the havoc caused by one very long one. If it did, you'd
have one bus a mile long causing less problems than 176 double
deckers.

The issues around blocking crossings and not being able to move across
box junctions etc etc are because all the length is in a single
vehicle.

So, does it allow plenty of access points, upper deck rather than
excessive road space and general accessibility?

Chances are it does, in which case I might take back some of my
criticisms of the project. *[...]

(Leaving aside road space issues...)

much cut

Not wanting to make all this exceptionally large, I accept all your
scepticism that I'm not forwarding on, and you couldn't be much more
sceptical than I already was; just that I melted slightly to see that
it isn't the Routemaster pastiche.