On 16 Sep, 23:02, Paul Corfield wrote:
Lots and lots of bus orders are being delayed already. A great big bow
wave is being created in order to keep costs down in the short term. If
the TfL budget is clobbered come 20th October then I really think full
scale roll out of up to 600 NB4Ls is very unlikely. It would cost tens
of millions of pounds just in capital cost never mind the operating
costs and risks. *If there was any discretionary expenditure I suspect
Boris would go for an expansion of the cycle hire scheme in preference
to NB4Ls. Just my wild guess.


Looking through the TfL projects approvals list, cycle hire extension
is still in there (although the cost has changed from £81.7m to
'commercially confidential'. New Bus For London has not appeared in
recent lists, presumably because the £11.4m already assigned is
sufficient. I conclude from this that there are no concrete plans to
invest TfL money in a rollout yet, regardless of what the hapless
Kulveer Ranger says - given the increasingly tight control on the
purse strings being made by the Commissioner (itself as clear a
warning as you like over the way things are going) the chances of the
tens of millions needed to subsidise recalcitrant operators to run the
things being hidden away are zero.

One other thing - the design will apparently be owned by TfL, possibly
avoiding the state aid/competition issue where other bus manufacturers
would legitimately have a case for suing TfL for excluding them from
the market by first funding Wrightbus to develop the NB4L, then
rigging bus tenders to require a single bus design.

I prefer ADL products, anyway - the new Eclipses on the 237 are
surprisingly horrible.

Tom