London Banter - View Single Post

[email protected] · February 14th 14, 07:51 PM posted to uk.transport.london

In article ,
(Paul Corfield) wrote:

On Fri, 14 Feb 2014 16:55:28 -0000, "Graham Harrison"
wrote:

That well known news source, the Steve Wright Show on Radio 2, has just
said that the Routemasters are going to be retired.

Is that true?

Not really. It's taken the Evening Standard at least 2 weeks to catch
up with the news and publish something.

TfL are consulting on the withdrawal of the Heritage 9 in order to
save £1m per annum on contract costs.

For now the Heritage 15 will remain in use. Part of the justification
is that there can be huge crowds at Tower Hill and the Heritage buses
arrive there empty and can "scoop up" the crowds better than a normal
15 that's started back at Blackwall. The other part is undoubtedly
political in that Boris can't be seen to completely scrap them having
promised to keep them! The other things is that it is apparently
"Year of the Bus" and people are already bleating that you *cannot*
scrap Routemasters in such a year (and yes it's 60 years this year
since the RM first appeared). I imagine enthusiasts will be chaining
themselves to route 9 Routemasters to try to prevent their withdrawal
:-)

Both of the Heritage routes are hugely expensive to run and should
have been scrapped years ago given their disproportionately high
running costs. I'm of the view that the 15 will go in 2016 because
the cuts to TfL's budget are so extreme that every penny has to be
saved from what are marginal services.

Why are the heritage routes so expensive? It's not as if they don't run on
busy routes.

--
Colin Rosenstiel