I'm reading this with interest - I'm the person who calculated the £60m extra annual cost in bus subsidy from scrapping all 340 or so bendy buses (Labour either calculated it separately or got it from me - I don't have any direct connection to them or the BBC story, which is based on a press release from Valerie Shawcross, Chair of the LA Transport Committee).First, some background. The 507 (which runs from Waterloo to Victoria via Horseferry Road) and the 521 are the first two bendy contracts to expire, next June. The 207 doesn't expire until April 2012, if First get their 2-year good performance extension. As it happens, the 507 and 521 are the two most suitable routes for bendies and the TfL replacement plans so far assume they'd be have to be replaced by 50% more rigid single deckers of longer wheelbase with the same sort of loading and fare arrangements. This leads to as yet unresolved issues with the sheer number of extra buses on the road and the congested common terminus at Waterloo, but that's by the way.The next most suitable route by my reckoning is the 207, since it's mostly straight, outside central London and carries a phenomenal number of people. In fact it should be replaced by a tram (a bendy is really a cheap sort of tram, not an alternative to double deckers), but the Tories and local voters apparently preferred bendy buses. How times change.Next, the campaign against bendies has its origins in a right wing disinformation exercise carried out by the Policy Exchange thinktank since 2005 - anything you read in the Standard, particularly by Andrew Gilligan (who contributed to the 2005 pamphlet), or anything you hear Policy Exchange's man on the spot Boris Johnson say on the subject should be treated as propaganda rather than a serious contribution to the discussion - New Accountable Boris has actually taken to deflecting any questions on the subject, greatly angering the Lib Dems this week. We call it the 'Bendy Jihad'.What it isn't is in any way an attempt to improve public transport in London, which ends the argument as far as I'm concerned, since that's what I want. If you want worse public transport that offers poor value for money, this may well be the policy for you, but you've got some explaining to do.Fare evasion - this is higher than average on bendy routes as whole, but the 507/521 are actually lower than average, since they serve mainly well-to-do City commuters and civil servants with season tickets. However, the annual cost of evasion (£8m in 2006 - but since any replacement bus would also suffer you don't get all £8m back - more like about £5.5m) doesn't pay the cost of replacing bendies and is certainly not anywhere near the cost of providing conductors (it's also dwarfed by evasion on the much larger fleet of non-bendy buses). London Travelwatch, whose report on bendies is well worth reading (not least because it reveals that they've not had any caseload of bus *passengers* reporting they they hate bendies), point out that you can't reliably judge the level of fare evasion by personal observation, owing to the level of Travelcard use, which in any case varies with route and time of day. Also, keen-eyed readers will have read a couple of recent Standard sob stories about people nicked on bendies without valid Oysters who found themselves in court, and enforcement activity is definitely tougher than it was.Replacement costs - the TfL figures show that the 507/521 would require a 3-for-2 replacement with smaller buses, so for every two drivers you have now you need to hire one more, including covering for shift patterns and holidays (i.e. it's not one-bus-one-driver). For the other route in the first phase, the 38, the ratio is 7-to-5. This is for double deckers. For the 207 it's quite possible that the only realistic way of coping with the demand without completely clogging the place up is to go with the 507/521 option of fast boarding single deckers with lots of standing room, which means a 50% increase in staffing costs. This goes on your ticket price, since it's a recurring annual cost, and a big one - equivalent to about a 10% increase in annual subsidy. Staffing costs are 60% of the cost of a bus network (fuel is 6%), so any policy that increases staff numbers while leaving the capacity the same or less is an extremely bad idea from a value-for-money point of view.Safety - I'm not aware of any cyclists being killed by bendy buses. I'm aware of a lot of cyclists killed by HGVs (in fact the cyclist death toll increased last year from 15 to 19, and it obviously wasn't bendies at fault). Therefore we should keep bendies and ban HGVs. More seriously, there are parts of the London road network that are particularly cyclist unfriendly, such as Elephant and Castle and Parliament Square roundabouts. However, TfL under its new management is *opposed* to plans to redesign them because they're expensive and might slow down motorists. In other words cyclist safety can get stuffed unless you're talking about bendy buses which, despite never being demonstrated to be a particular threat relative to other issues on London's roads, must be eliminated. The logic is, um, indistinct, to say the least. The figures TfL gave out in February showed that there was no difference between bendy accident rates and other buses *on comparable routes*. We're certainly talking about comparable routes with a non-bendy 207, of course, since it's, er, the same route.In short the case against bendies doesn't stack up. The case *for* bendies, therefore, wins at a canter, since it's based on the requirement to keep London moving, get the best value-for-money in difficult economic times and provide responsibly for the huge increase in bus patronage over the last few years.
Thomas Barry ● 6544d