Adrian wrote:
gurgled happily, sounding much like they
were saying:
It has not been beaten since in a number of areas, most notably that
most modern buses weigh half as much again (or double in the case of
bendies).
A chunk more than that...
An RM is about 7.5t ULW.
A Citaro bendy is about 18t ULW.
With substantially higher capacity, nearly twice as much. I still don't
get why people compare RMs with bendies all the time - the former is the
ultimate traditional London bus from an age where you could afford large
amounts of labour, the latter is a cheap tram, brought in quickly to
cope with rising demand before proper electrically powered rail based
solutions could be developed.
However, the mass per passenger is a lot more (in the range of about
40-50%), but if you compare bendy against conventional double decker
it's rather closer and if you compare bendy against bendy replacement
single decker the bendy wins on weight (and indeed on pretty much every
other ground - the rigid option has more buses, more cumulative length
of bus, more drivers and more risk to cyclists) This is important
because the replacement for bendies on two of the first three routes
will be rigid single deckers - they were never RM routes. I can't wait
for the spin on that one.
So why are modern buses heavier? Partly, I suspect, for the same
reasons modern trains are heavier - for many years the commercial
incentives in what is now a competitive market were around minimising
initial cost, maintenance and downtime (which translates as 'stick a bit
of extra metal on it and don't waste time optimising for weight or it'll
be late to market and uncompetitive on price') and people have got
bigger - the RM is a bit narrower and a lot shorter than a modern bus,
which are usually 2550mm wide.
Free markets don't lead to optimised design, since design quality is one
of a number of conflicting requirements in product design in a
competitive environment. I'm not sure a convinced Thatcherite like
Boris necessarily understands this, considering how he keeps going on
about value for money.
Tom