Tom Barry gurgled happily, sounding much like
they were saying:

With substantially higher capacity, nearly twice as much.

....as long as everybody's happy about standing, of course.

The Bendy has far less seating capacity.

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

That's a bad thing?

more cumulative length of bus

Only if the buses are somehow firmly fixed nose-to-tail.

more drivers

And?

and more risk to cyclists

Mmmm. Every London cyclist I know seems to loath bendis with a _passion_.
Usually based on a near-death-experience.

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.

OK, so scale the RM width up from 2440mm (8') to 2550mm. You've just gone
up from 7.5t to 7.8t.
Scale the RM length up from 9.1m (30' RML) to 10.8m (Dennis Enviro 400),
and you're up to 9.2t. So where'd that other few tons come from on the
nice shiny modern "fuel-efficient" bus, then?

The modern double-deckers don't seat or stand any more people than the
RMs, either.

Bendis just plain don't fit London streets with tight junctions,
pedestrian refuges and frequent traffic lights.

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.

I'm not sure it's quite that simple. Purchase cost is just one factor in
the complete lifecycle running costs.