Transport for London (TfL) has now announced the two winners of the competition to design the new Routemaster. One is a joint venture between Aston Martin (who obviously think the credit crunch make buses a better bet than luxury cars!) and Foster + Partners, and the other was designed by Capoco, a firm which designs buses, coaches and trucks.

I suspect a lot of people will be disappointed. Neither of these creations actually looks like the much-loved RM. In particular, the radiator of the Capoco design looks very squashed – not the friendly ‘face’ of the traditional bus, but a pudgy scowl.

Aston Martin’s luxury bus

However, get over your initial disappointment and look at what the Foster/Aston Martin design delivers. A drive-by-wire system, solar panels, zero emissions capability, and an interior with wooden floors and warm lighting that has been designed to feel ‘convivial’. This is not a dumbing-down, lowest-cost alternative – it’s in the great traditions of British transport, believing that everyone, however impecunious, is entitled to good design and a decent service. Not over the top in that regard, but wholesome, decent, good.

While I find its lines a little bit too Teletubby – it does look rather like a toy bus, though some of that may be the style of the graphics – it looks friendly and even slightly amusing. I can imagine Londoners coming to love this bus. Or, Londoners being what they are, slagging it off in a gentle, tolerant way.

Capoco – practical but boring?

This is a design that I suspect suffers in the TfL presentation by the fact that all the interesting stuff is beneath the surface. It just doesn’t look that good – but the low floor, hybrid electric drive, and redesigned drive-train system, are significant engineering advances on the old RM.

What is very interesting is that Alan Ponsford, at Capoco, says that in thirty years of working in the sector, Capoco has never before seen an open competition for bus design. Competitions are commonplace in the architectural world – maybe there should be more of them in other aspects of urban design?

So for once, kudos to Boris Johnson for a real innovation. (Regular readers of this blog will know I don’t give Boris many breaks, but for once, he’s done something worth praising.)

My personal favourite…

So often, it takes an outsider to notice things that you walk past every day. Sometimes, strangers give you better advice than the people you know best. And so in this case, it took a team of Catalan designers (hailing separately from Barcelona, London and Valencia) to come up with a design that for me, just is the Routemaster.

You see, what’s happened with both the winning designs, I think, is that they know the Routemaster so well that they’ve taken little bits of it as cultural references, which we can look at and say, ‘Oh, that’s like the real Routemaster’. It’s a bit Russell T Davies really. But while it’s clever and arty, it doesn’t make a bus.

The runner up design, by Hector Sarrano, Miñaro Garcia and Javier Esteban, takes the traditional Routemaster with its tall, narrow feel, and makes it curvier, gives it a sort of go-faster feel, while opening up the interior space and making the aisles and stairs wider. Again, it’s a hybrid (diesel-electric) – and it’s light and compact, which makes it both cheap to run, and in my view better for central London’s narrow and twisty streets.

Anyway, if you have any interest in buses, graphic design or just the way London’s urban fabric is pinned together, it’s well worth taking a trip to the TfL website and looking at the designs. And, just for fun, the pdf file with details of the winners also has the winners of the ‘imagine’ competition – from youngsters’ crayoned impressions to some incredibly articulate and radical ideas from younger designers.

Photo credit: Spencer E Holtaway on Flickr

Post from: The London Traveler

Boris Johnson has just dramatically cut London’s future transport plans.  And he’s also announced that the fares Londoners pay will be going up.

Boris is cutting a whole raft of projects:

• the Thames Gateway Bridge
• the Cross River Tram (Euston to Waterloo – two very badly served termini)
• extension  of the Docklands Light Railway to Dagenham
• tram extension to from Crystal Palace to Croydon
• the Oxford Street tram
• plans for bus routes on two new estates in East London.

At the same time he’s said fares will rise by 1% more than inflation. That basically means 6% or more for next year, I’d reckon.

To be fair Boris does make some good points. The money isn’t necessarily going to be there – Ken Livingstone was planning these routes in a boom, and we’ve now got a recession to deal with.

And the Mayor’s office points out that the schemes that are going ahead will deliver a 30% increase in transport capacity over the next ten years.

But I can’t help feeling Boris just doesn’t think public transport  is worthwhile.He might want to move the Thames Gateway Bridge to another site  – Friends of the Earth, among others, objected to the previous plan – but by pulling in the plans, he’s junking two years of planning as well as potentially risking several hundred million of committed central government funds.

And by cutting those east London links, he’s effectively  cutting  adrift a huge number of residents – and ruining the prospects for the Thames Gateway development. All the houses there  are presumably going ahead, just they’ll have no transport for anyone to commute into London for work. Boris has just created a sink estate.  That’s not clever.

(Of course the Thames Gateway plan is a Labour plan. Am I the only one to think that Boris might be sinking it for party politcal reasons? Or am I just a really nasty cynical person?)

Meanwhile we’ll all be paying more. Well, fares rose under Ken too – unless you had an Oyster card or a season ticket. But now, we’ll be paying more for less.

At least Crossrail will be going ahead. About twenty years too late, but that’s life for you.

Full details of the ten year plan are to be found on the Mayor’s website.

Photo, a witty comment from Annie Mole on flickr

Post from: The London Traveler