London Banter - View Single Post

Tim Roll-Pickering · January 20th 12, 06:42 PM posted to uk.transport.london

d wrote:

And here's one for you - if the bendies were so fantastic and the double
deckers clearly so outdated why weren't there bendies on more routes?

I've no idea. Cost, reliability, lots of nearly new DDs already in service
that they didn't want to bin? AFAIR the bendies replaced a lot of
routemasters
that were put out to grass.

Very few of the bendified routes took over from routemasters. Many of them
took over from the more conventional double deckers.

People in this group and others talk about double decker trains not being
as a
good a solution for transporting a lot of passengers compared to longer
single
deck trains because of dwell times at stations yet for some reason that
logic
goes out the window when appled to buses.

Part of that is rooted in the different considerations on dwell times and
the speed of boarding/disembarking. The height restrictions of many rail
routes make double decker carriages extremely difficult to operate - the
4DDs were an especially cramped design. Plus railways can include ticket
checks before boarding, a feature not easily built into buses.

The only reason I can see is some
misty eyed nostaligia for double decker buses. God knows why.

Reasons aplenty have been given on this thread and others for why the double
decker is preferred. If you choose not to see them then you choose not to
see them.