Welcome to Reconnections’ Friday Reads:
-
- • When poetry, light & warmth advertised the Tube (EthicalGirl)
- • The wonderful world of off-peak London (MappingLondon)
- • Chat with Mark Ovenden, World Metro Maps author (GeoffMarshall)
- • Five worst bus innovations (TransportDesigned)
- • European alliances as a Tube map (WashingtonPost)
- • An American in Stockholm, and its Metro (Curbed)
- • eScooters are the new bike scare (ColumbusDispatch)
- • Portland’s new bike traffic circle (StreetsBlog)
- • LA Metro may number or letter its rail lines (LACurbed)
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Anent the road-railer bus, I recall DB actually had one or two of these used in regular passenger carrying service – probably back in the ’70s.
Of the “Worst bus innovations”, the Borismaster manages to incorporate three
3. Plug door (on the later builds)
2. Rear door
1. Heavy batteries
The poetry & imagery of the older posters is very evocative.
Unfortunately, TfL/Underground seem to have given up on this & I don’t like the current trend,
The internal comments on the US visitors’ appreciation of Stockholm were very depressing …
I wonder what he ( & the other commenters ) would have made of Berlin / Paris / London?
As for bonkers buses … has anyone seen the wonderful film “Closely Observed ( or “Watched” ) Trains” ??
YouTube link here start at 16.36 for true insanity.
And: The problem with plug doors at the front of a bus is that they tend to hit things. Raised Kassel kerbs. Bus stop poles. Shelters. People. That sort of thing. Yes, well …..
“We’re sure there’s more”
Well – guided busways, for a start, as Cambridge – St Ives has shown amongst other places.
@LBM
I can’t get to the LATimes site from London… Can someone post a summary?
[I’ve changed the link, everyone should be able to read it now. LBM]
@timbeau – it’s arguable that some of the “worst bus innovations” are more subtle than those listed – rear engines or chassisless construction, for example, or even the switch from petrol to diesel – all of which have either made the passenger experience much less comfortable, or imposed extra costs on the operator..
Timbeau
Borismaster……..three doors, two staircases is a good thing – they do wonders for boarding and alighting times. The centre door was always a plug door and lots of other London buses have plug centre doors. The plug rear door is a massive improvement on the former folding door. The latter was only provided whilst the attendants were in place (the attendants were arguably a really daft innovation). I believe the point being made was that plug doors on the front doorway was a daft idea as the fronts of buses often get near to the curb, whereas the rest of the bus usually doesn’t.
As to heavy batteries – they are a feature of hybrid buses which might still be required on routes where a full electric double decker can’t deliver the required range. I think the biggest sin is that the overall design – engineering and visual design in harmony to deliver the required outcome – capacity, weight, performance and look nice. I suspect the visuals trumped everything else, and that’s the biggest sin of all. Sadly, although it looks very different, it doesn’t look very nice (in the eye of the beholder!)
I rather liked the Ftr buses that ran between town and the university in York; the main issue was that the roads on that route just didn’t suit them.
@Matthew – the scandal was that in some cities, noteably Swansea, the local council had to spend significant sums modifying the road geometry – for example at roundabouts – to accommodate ftr operations.
Brelin’s monster three-axle, double-staircase double-deckers seem to work quite well.
But they are significantly larger (longer) than a BorisBus.
Apologies for the unsolicited link.
Central London bus cuts consultation:
https://consultations.tfl.gov.uk/buses/central-london/?cid=central-london-bus-consultation
Big changes, big cuts.
Given the huge scope, and snoggles previous writing, is an article on the topic within radar?
Re Ben,
A surprising chunk of those cuts are actually related to the completion of Thameslink infrastructure and the London Bridge rebuild .
A number of others are related to reducing traffic through key junctions.
@GT
Berlin has had double decker buses since pre-First World War, nothing unusual there, they looked very similar then to those in other major European cities.
It would be interesting to understand how European double-deckers have diverged in design since WW1. Apart of course from this one: http://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/triple_decker_city_bus
Only in Britain would rear doors on a bus be considered a ‘crazy innovation’ – as the article points out, they are pretty normal in most other countries. Arguably the crazy thing about British buses is the resolute refusal to learn lessons from other countries.
The more interesting thing about the Lucas road-rail bus that the article misses is that it appears to be an outcome of anarcho-syndicalism – aerospace workers deciding off their own bat to stop making weapons and start making something more ‘socially useful’. Sort of a left-wing counterpart to the APT’s contemporary attempt to bring aerospace technology to transport (or Boeing’s disastrous foray into making trams).
@Greg T: Repeatedly asserting that the Cambridge busway is a failure does not make it so.
@JR: Apart of course from this one
Some convergent evolution there with London, perhaps, or at least Watford.
@Ian J
Both those articles quote the special effects designer as saying it was converted from “60 year old Routemasters”, “introduced in 1956 and operating for 50 years”. It is in fact based on the older RT design, which operated in London from 1939 to 1979.
@Ian J re @GT
Indeed. There is plenty of other evidence to prove that . Unfortunately, it is worthy of an article of its own.
Misconceived, consultations ignored, poorly constructed, unsuitable design for ground conditions, poor safety record, does not solve the problems ot promised to, low passenger numbers, falling to pieces and of course, hugely more expensive than budgeted.
It has also screwed up the central section of the East West railway.
@Nameless
Cambridgeshire CC figures show that the Busway is carrying around 20% more passengers than it did four years ago. There are not many bus routes around that can show this level of growth.
Traveller
Given that there is no other (?) public transport alternative …
Tge bit that really gets me about that is that the train service in 1922 was faster than the bus is now.
@Ian J/traveller – maybe it is more heavily travelled than it was (hardly surprising given the horrendous congestion on the roads round Cambridge) but for the same money or less, you could have reinstalled a conventional railway with higher capacity.
@Jonathan Roberts – it’s not quite clear why doubledeck buses never appeared in quantity on the Continent, even in cities. like Paris where there had been an extensive fleet of double deck trams. Were it not for the Paris example, one might be tempted to say that the wellnigh universal use of trams + trailers instead of double-decker trams had conditioned people against climbing stairs and that the predominance of these trams in urban systems put a term to any further widespread use of double deck vehicles. Perhaps the question needs turning upside down – why did the UK adopt double-deckers so wholeheartedly? That may have something to do with the Inspectorate’s discouragement of tram trailer operation leading to the “normalisation” of climbing stairs, although doubledeck horsebuses had appeared a decade or two before tramways.
BTW the Germans experimented in the ’50s with 1 1/2 deck buses rather like the BOAC coaches; Solingen even some 1 1/2 deck trolley buses.
@Traveller
See link:
https://www.smartertransport.uk/why-not-to-trust-transport-forecasts/
Double deck buses: The origin (people sitting on the roof of stagecoaches) was still perceptible right up to the end of bus conductors, by their universal use of the word “inside” to mean “on the lower deck”.
So-called one-and-a-half deck buses are of course nothing of the sort. They are just single deckers with some of the seats high enough to store luggage underneath. The principle is almost universal in long-distance coaches these days (except that “some” is replaced by “all”), and in low-floor single-deckers (with “luggage” replaced by “oily bits”).
@Malcolm
No, one-and-a-half deck buses do have two decks of passenger seating at the rear.
Interior pictures of the former Aachen example at Sandtoft here: http://citytransport.info/Aachen.htm
@Malcolm
Most, but not all, one-and-a-half deckers are as you describe.
https://www.fotocommunity.de/photo/buessing-anderthalbdecker-braunschw-frank-heusinger/37001910
https://www.carthrottle.com/post/citroen-u55-cityrama-currus/
Traveller (and timbeau): You are quite right here. It’s obviously time for me to make the expedition to Sandtoft. I am afraid I made the lazy assumption that the German examples were rather more “like the BOAC coaches” than Graham evidently meant.
Re. the Cambridge Busway: It is the inevitable result of a total failure to coordinate land use and transport planning. The town was allowed to develop beyond the old railway alignment making use of numerous level crossings. While these are safe(ish) for a ‘bus to cross they simply would not work with any kind of frequent train service. It would be prohibitively expensive to provide grade separation, so we are stuck with it. (And, of course, us oldies get free rides which we wouldn’t with a train, so it is well used.)
Sorry for the lack of precision, although the BOAC coaches had luggage “downstairs”, I was trying to give a GIZZ for those – no doubt the great majority – who had not come across the German cases. Indeed, the German examples had 2 levels of passenger accommodation at the rear. There were never very many of them. I ddn’t know any survived, let alone at Sandtoft. I imagine sitting so close to the boom mounts at the back must be quite noisy.
BTW, just for amusement, trolleybus trailers also existed in a fair number of German-speaking countries, although few took them to the lengths of the much lamented Steffisburg-Thun-Interlaken route which ran 4 car trains of trolleybus + trailers including a postal sorting vehicle and a 1 axle postal trailer. (And let’s not get into the numerous freight trolleybus operations…)
@ Malcolm
Sandtoft is definitely worth a visit – I found them really friendly. But be warned, it must be one of the most difficult places in the country to get to by public transport. The nearest station – Crowle – is four miles away and has no Sunday service. Sandtoft’s only bus service plies its lonely path from Wroot to Epworth and back (you will look in vain for either place on a railway timetable) with a frequency of 0.006bph* – every Friday morning, when the museum isn’t open anyway.
(*it’s grim up north)
@Graham H
Why would sitting near the boom mounts be any noisier on one of those than upstairs on any other trolleybus?
@timbeau
Looks like the Soviets copied the style of the Citroën Cityrama Currus for their hydrofoil designs.
If you want to visit Sandtoft it is worth checking on their special openings when there may be a special bus service from Doncaster – easy to reach for most Londoners.
Re: LA’s numbers/letters/colours conundrum
We’ve discussed this before – LA proposes a change, then keeps the status quo of colours as there’s too many competing issues at play.
The visually-impaired don’t like the colours as they are just words, but it’s Spanish-speakers’ favourite option as they don’t need English to describe them. English-speakers like the letters, but no-one else does (Koreans most-strongly against as they use different letters) and letters like E are confusing as they tend to mean something (the Expo line going West from downtown causes issues currently). The numbers are loved by Korean-speakers, and Spanish-speakers like them, as do English-speakers who don’t currently use transit, but English-speakers who use transit say its confusing due to buses and platform numbers.
Colours would be far more acceptable if they didn’t do nonsense like name a line that only interchanges with the Green line as the ‘Olive line’. Pink or Brown were the colours historically used for the Crenshaw/LAX line that will create the Olive line and have a contrast!
@timbeau – because the rumble of the trolleyheads, especially when passing under special work* is transmitted directly to the mounts, elsewhere the rumble is merely airborne.
*Special work in LT-speak is any o/h crossings and points that are not standard geometry (ie most of them) and usually embedded in wooden frames. I believe the Nags Head had about 1.5 tonnes of such kit suspended above the road.
@Si
Giving each line its own name/colour/number? What a strange idea.
Have some spaghetti in tomato sauce.
http://www.projectmapping.co.uk/Reviews/Resources/london-overground-network-d.pdf
@ Graham H
I am sure that LT Trolleybuses under special work make a distinct drumming noise which is body transmitted.
@Jim Jordan – as I recall at this great distance in time. it was a sort of hollow thud as the trolley heads hit the various obstacles. The pictures I’ve seen of Sandtoft suggest it has nothing like the complexity of o/h work encountered on even fairly modest systems – for obvious reasons, alas The Swiss, Czech, and Russian systems that I’ve encountered which did have complex junctions tended to use lighter o/h with secondary suspension, which was much quieter and didn’t require the wire to be fixed to wooden backing.
Re Cambridge Busway, timetables show ten buses an hour off-peak between Cambridge and St Ives. I believe that many are double-deck, but assuming 50 seats per vehicle, that is 500 seats per hour, and may be more. The best you could expect by train is a half-hourly service (so less convenient) with two or three carriages, so say 360 seats maximum per hour. From my limited experience of the service the buses were more comfortable than many of the trains operating from Cambridge.
The buses may be no faster than the train in 1922, but they go direct to the city centre, rather than terminating at a station about a mile away, so much more convenient.
It is a pity the system has been let down by construction standards, but the busway concept seems sound to me. Dunstable is a good example, with buses having a speedy journey from Luton and then circulating round the housing estates, rather than terminating near the centre and requiring an onward connection by bus.
@ROGERB – perhaps the new AFBCL (automatic full barrier crossing, locally monitored) now being trialled by NR in Scotland, at Ardrossan Princes Street, will be a solution for crossings on new/reopened minor lines where grade separation isn’t practical or desirable. This takes the basic functionality of a half barrier ABCL with its drivers’ red and white flashing lights and roadway illumination at night, substitutes full barriers and adds an obstacle detection system. Where it differs from MCB-OD (manually controlled barriers obstacle detection) crossings already widely installed is the local monitoring by approaching train drivers. While this severely limits approach speed, it results in much shorter road closed time than where full interlocking with protecting signals is implemented for MCB-OD. On local branch lines with an exclusively all stations service pattern, the local monitoring feature is particularly suitable for typical ‘station crossing’ locations where trains are already decelerating for a stop or starting away from rest. Another way to allow road/rail crossings safely at grade is to ‘demote’ the railway to light rail standards under tramway regulations, where a similar ‘local monitoring’ regime applies in principle at such intersections but without barriers of any kind and requiring all rail vehicles operating to be equipped with road vehicle compliant light clusters and side skirting over the wheels, as well as tram-like enhanced stopping capability.
A video showing the Ardrossan installation: https://youtu.be/zBZxIOeBPG8
@Londoner in Scotland – had the line been reopened as a railway, it’s highly likely to have been electrified, probably using 4 car sets (317s or 321s) which would provide rather more seats with a 2 tph service, although there is no reason why the service should have been limited to 2 tph if the demand was there. I understand the point you make about buses continuing to the city centre, however, between Drummer Street and the railway station, there are relatively few sources of employment and the jams in Regent Street are horrendous, even off peak. It is invariably quicker to walk these days.* I am not sure the buses offer much advantage whether they have come off the busway or from elsewhere.
* the scope for providing the “secret” bus service of my undergraduate days – an unblinded LS parked up opposite the UCOC 128 that had struggled in from Northampton, with a slip board declaring “Centre 6d” – is long gone
@Timbeau “Giving each line its own name/colour/number? What a strange idea.”
The question isn’t about whether to differentiate lines (to which the answer is clearly ‘yes’), but how to do it.
Currently lines are distinguished by colours, which name them (with an exception): Red, Purple, Blue, Green, Gold, Expo, Orange, Silver. LA keeps wondering whether they need letters/numbers as names instead (though the colours would stay in the bullets for the line).
The irony of some Cambridge buses ridiculously yo-yo-ing down to the end of the busway to connect with the station at Cambridge North seems to be totally lost on some people!
Given the recent record of electrification, would a Cambridge – St Ives (- Huntingdon?) service really likely to have been electrified? Perhaps a 153 or maybe a two car 156 shuttling up and down once an hour would have been likely, and who knows how many intermediate stations would have been reinstated for it to call at?
Possibly also worth noting that the Anglia franchise is/was hardpushed to cover its dmu diagrams, and I understand that it is not unusual for the Felixstowe and Sudbury branches to be substituted by bus when there are rolling stock issues.
Finally, what would rail reinstatement have cost? The Chiltern Evergreen 3 project started at £250m and was quoted at £320m when the Oxford link opened.
@Traveller – at the time the busway was built, electrification had not acquired the cost reputation it now has; there was also then -as there still is – a shortage of dmus, as you note, so electrification would have been very likely indeed (I would place a small bet that the requisite emus could have been squeezed out of the existing fleet). As to cost, the only comparable cost comes from the Borders line, which opened at about the same time and cost around £15m a mile including several intermediate stations. Going to St Ives would presumably have cost much the same pro rata. The content of Evergreen 3 is not strictly comparable with either.
@Graham H/Traveller
Debatable whether electrification to St Ives would have happened – looking at East Anglia, hey somehow justified it to Ely and Kings Lynn but not, for example, to Bury St Edmunds, Great Yarmouth, or Thetford. St Ives is smaller than any of them.
@timbeau – I’m afraid you are somewhat adrift on your history for once. Electrification to Ely and Lynn was promoted by NSE. Bury and the other places you mention was RR territory at the time and they were all about cost reduction, not expanding the network. If there had been a business case for reopening to StIves, it would have been NSE promoting it. In fact, the business case for reopening wasn’t at all good and the business case for the busway even less so. The whole thing was and is a vanity project.
If only the Overground would follow the lead and name/number/identify the routes individually!
@Graham H
But how did the Kings Lynn branch become such a peculiar outlier of NSE in the first place?
@timbeau – driven by the shape of the market, I would expect. No different in that respect from Waterloo – Exeter, which if electrified to Salisbury would have left an NSE diesel shuttle onwards to Exeter. This was not done because there was so much cross-Salisbury traffic, even in those days, and the case for electrifying the whole route didn’t, unfortunately, stack up.
Graham H
And no-one was prepeared to re- run the previous Waterloo – Southampton / Weymouth
electric unit diesel push-pull arrangement, presumably?
Or didn’t the costs stack up, even then?
@Greg T – they didn’t, alas. * (They’d been pretty marginal for Bournemouth-Weymouth – as I recall, it was a dead heat between a shuttle and electrifying throughout, so the choice was an easy political one). Lynn was some way off being clearcut and depended on a contribution from the local council – I have related earlier the unhappy hoops through which we made the councillors jump to come up with the funds).
The fringes of NSE were driven partly by operational convenience – one thinks of Paignton and Hereford as being waifs left over from the core business. The idea was to keep RR as small as possible and well away from London.
*One of the Exeter comparators involved constructing a new class of loco (the 48?) to power the through services – I’m not sure there were sufficient 33 s left at the time.
@GH
I think you have misunderstood me – I understand that electrification to Lynn made some kind of sense given that it was one of NSE’s only two diesel operations in East Anglia (the other being the Sudbury branch). The question was why the Kings Lynn line was allocated to the LSE sector in the first place, given that the other lines north from Cambridge (to Norwich and Peterborough – both of which shared tracks with the Lynn route as far as Ely – and Ipswich) were all allocated to Regional Railways.
@timbeau – I really don’t know – it may have had something to do with the timing of the Cambridge electrification. Certainly, whenever I have used that route, there has been considerable cross-Cambridge traffic.
@GH
40-45% of passengers boarding between Kings Lynn and Waterbeach go on towards London. The other 55%+ are local to the Kings Lynn-Cambridge sector or change at Ely. Since London-related fares revenues are strong, with weaker income on other flows, you really don’t want to discourage this through travel.
@ Ben – I understand JB will be putting finger to keyboard in respect of an article on current issues affecting the London bus network. I do not know when it will appear. I won’t be writing anything. I doubt I could be sufficiently objective about what is being proposed by TfL.
@Milton Clevedon – Indeed you don’t. I cannot now recall what the split was back in the ’80s, but the problem with the electrification case was not the split but that the volumes were too low. Observation suggests that wouldn’t be the case now.
Basically, the allocation of a route to a sector was determined by the flow that set the characteristic of the route – strip out the profitable long distance and airport traffic (to IC), those routes which had significant London commuter flows (NSE) and push the remainder at OPS (whoops, RR), Behind that was a view that the different sectors required different technology and had different commercial futures ahead. I suspect that today, we would see the distinctions as far less clear – GWML and the outer reaches of SWML have not dissimilar demand patterns: medium sized settlements with long distance London commuting, although DfT has yet to catch up with this when it comes to rolling stock procurement.
@Graham H: at the time the busway was built, electrification had not acquired the cost reputation it now has
In other words, estimates of the cost of electrification at the time were way too low, and if the branch line had reopened as an electrified railway there would inevitably have been major cost overruns (as there were on the Borders railway and Croxley link) – a clear example of the peril I mentioned earlier of comparing hypothetical cost (of a rail reopening) with actual outturn cost (of the busway).
None of which has any bearing of course on the initial question of whether the busway is a failure. The existence of a superior hypothetical alternative to a project can’t make that project itself a failure.
@Ian J – I agree with your last sentence although it doesn’t apply in this case where the correct comparison is between a project built 20 years ago and the available alternatives at the time, of course. [The other way of looking at it would be to compare two alternatives with both at today’s prices and scope]. The busway was also subject to massive cost overruns BTW. I don’t however, agree at all with your first assertion – the work content of current electrification schemes is very different to what it was 20 years ago: things were done much more cheaply, and yet they have shown themselves to be fit for purpose – even the much maligned ECML,
Lower electrification costs in the 1980s and early 1990s were also a consequence of running a continuing programme. BR managed to get new schemes authorised in time to keep the electrification teams occupied, rather than the stop start stop resulting from changes in policy. This was among the factors influencing electrification to Kings Lynn, as well as being able to use the ECML electrification depot at Peterborough while it was still there.
The desire to build on experience and maintain continuity is among the reasons why Transport Scotland is pressing NR to come up with proposals for electrification to Perth and East Kilbride.
Re LONDONER IN SCOTLAND,
TS seems to want electrification approval at GRIP2 at the moment! The problem is that progress has shot up with not much in the pipeline (all focuses on completing work in progress) which will lead to thumb twiddling unfortunately. Time for some renewals of older unreliable equipment to fill the gap in places? Lots of civils and structures to do before actual electrification works can take place.
@Londoner in Scotland – Indeed – one of the major headaches for BR and their civil servant sponsors was trying to keep such continuity going. No10, aided and abetted by the Deputy Secretary/Transport Industries, frequently intervened if it thought that there was so much as a whiff of anything like an investment programme in the railways.
The ploy is getting harder to sustain as the portfolio of reasonable bets for electrification is shrinking (and in 3rd rail country, the argument isn’t sustainable anyway as the amount of infill left is small).
Another important feature in keeping costs low was the willingness of the engineers to contemplate less-than-perfect solutions for now, on the assumption that once you had got the electrification up and running, more lasting solutions would be found as and when. Needless to say, that thought didn’t appear in the formal appraisals. It was also why the Board was shocked when the then Board member for Finance remarked (but only after privatisation was safely under way) that the real test of Railtrack’s mettle would be de-electrifying ECML
Re Graham H,
And NR’s test – sorting out the reliability of the ECML electrification?
The fact that the MBTA thought “So we put another band down low about a foot off the floor with the station name repeated” was worthwhile just amazes me with the assumption that it would be visible to passengers! Does nobody wait on the platform?