Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 19:11:01 on Tue, 1 Oct 2019,
Recliner remarked:

So, we have a bus that's 84% more expensive, with less capacity, longer and
heavier than a normal double-decker, less comfortable, worse fuel
consumption and whose entire reason for existence, the open rear platform,
is not used. No wonder the hoped-for sale of the design to other cities
never happened.

Yes, all granted. But apart from that, they're fine.

Nothing to do with the Romans.

Actually I really dislike them. I can't really say why, but they seem
cramped. And, as I normally have a paper ticket (an ODTC from outside
London) I can't take advantage of the mid/rear dors.

Isn't the rear door locked out of use (it's hard to keep up).

No, it behaves the same as the other two doors: open at stops, closed when
moving. It's long been that way out of the central area, but it's been
like that everywhere since Khan cut the excessive costs of the buses by
getting rid of all the platform attendants.

Thanks. I was conflating "locked out of use always", with "locked out of
use when under way". The essential difference [user friendliness] of the
old London buses was you could hop and off whenever they were paused, eg
at traffic lights, quite irrespective of where the bus stops were.

Yup, and that was the original idea with the new buses, but Boris ignored
the warnings that this would no longer be permitted with an unsupervised
open platform, because of modern elfin safety rules.

With his perennial, verbose optimism, you could say he was confident that
"the doomsters and the gloomsters" would be proved wrong. But it turned out
that they did know what they were talking about, and TfL was left to keep
paying the hefty bill for his failed experiment, while he moved onwards and
upwards. He also cost TfL money for dumping the bendies prematurely.