On Wed, 7 Jan 2009, David Cantrell wrote:

On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 07:19:22PM +0000, Tom Anderson wrote:

While having fewer doors and more stairs. Which means it will have to wait
for longer at each stop, and so ...

The quicker boarding claim was demolished by the ASA in 2005:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4531057.stm

Firstly, please have the good grace not to trim posts so hard that i have
to wade through google groups to find out what was actually written.

Secondly, i hardly call it 'demolished' - for those interested in reading
sources rather than halfwit BBC reporters' praeses:

http://www.asa.org.uk/asa/adjudicati...ation_id=39734

While there are a few stops where lots of people get on and off -
bendies are quite clearly faster here - most stops aren't used anything
like that heavily so the number of doors makes no difference.

A bendy has a shorter dwell time if 10 more more passengers are boarding,
and longer if it's less than that. But that's compared to a routemaster,
not a blunderbus. The reason a bendy can take longer is because of the
kneeling suspension - the bus takes time to lower and raise itself at
stops, so that there's level boarding. The routemaster didn't do that. If
the new buses don't, then they may be able to retain that advantage.
However, if they have an engine at the front and a rear-wheel drive, as
we've been promised, then they'll have an axle, and won't be low-floor (no
matter what the concept sketches say), which means they probably will have
to kneel, in which case the advantage evaporates.

tom

--
resistance is fertile