General Discussion

This is my blog from the 16 July Bulletin. Let us know your thoughts about kerb guided buses, Routemasters, nostalgia and/or whether every Focus article should be balanced or thought-provoking.

So Fedex is gunning for TNT. It's all change in the world of logistics - just ask anyone who was working for Innovate or Macfarlane a few weeks ago. Yet there seems much less sentiment about such changes than in, say, the world of passenger transport.

Innovate and MacFarlane will be mere names a few years from now, but when I go back to visit my parents I find people are still in active mourning for Silver Star Motor Services buses - and I'm pretty sure they finished in the 60s. Mention the GWR and there are still people who go misty eyed sixty years after its demise - despite some of the gloss coming off the resurrected Great Western name in recent years

I can run articles in Focus saying 4PLs don't work and 4PL providers write interesting articles in response. I can run articles saying RFID is in the same cul-de-sac as Betamax and Sinclair C5s and I'll get a polite letter back from people who's bread and butter is RFID. But if I print articles of equal combativeness about whether passenger transport is really greener than the car or questioning the infrastructure costs of kerb guided buses and things hot up very quickly. Take a look at your next Focus letters pages to see what I mean.

Not much inspires stronger feelings than London's buses - and in particular the Routemaster. This week TV's public transport loathing Top Gear asked how long Boris Johnson needed to get rid of the Bendy buses. Boris Johnson promised to have them gone - and introduce a new Routemaster.

TfL's competition to design a Routemaster for the 21st century seems to have caught the publics' imagination - whatever its motivation.

There's a top prize of £25,000 and two categories: for proper technical plans (Design a bus for London); and for luddites like me there's Imagine a bus for London, in which us non draughtsmen can crayon or scrawl our own efforts. Full details at www.tfl.gov.uk/anewbusforlondon. and we've a great design in August's Focus.

It's tricky to sketch a design on the back of a fag packet these days because they have ‘smoking causes a slow and painful death' written all over them. But I've created a masterpiece on my son's Colour Doodle and it looks... exactly like Routemaster. If you must have a half cab with an open rear platform then the RM can't really be beaten. If it was never broke, why did they have to ‘fix' them? (I'm using the word fix in its ominous 1930s Jimmy Cagney movie sense).

I've searched my soul and found I have absolutely no opinion about bendy buses. I can see they make operational sense, but I can also see why cyclists are not fans. Now I did thoroughly enjoy RMs due to my complete lack of ability to be at a designated bus stop at any set time. To the admonishments of astonished conductors I would zig zag across several lanes of cars to pirouette aboard.

Getting aboard a bendy bus means careful positioning and forward planning in the ticket purchase department, which is why I have never actually been aboard one.

But that doesn't mean old buses are better. The decline in passenger transport really hit in the 1970s. Some blame it on the rise of car ownership but any passenger of the time will confirm it was really because of the Leyland National. A hateful device with high, rattling windows; a stripped out interior that would have struck a visiting citizen of the USSR as particularly sparse; brakes that squealed like it had mown down a herd of cats; and blue smoke that must have warmed up the atmosphere so quickly it was probably responsible for the golden summer of 1976.

Modern buses are much better in so many ways than anything from the 70s - or even, sentimentality aside, the 50s Routemaster. They are safer, more reliable; far safer to board and sort wheelchairs; and it's so much easier to tell where they are going and where you are.

Having lit the touchpaper I shall now retire to a safe distance - I'm on holiday in Weymouth next week so Alexandra will bring you next week's Bulletin. I'm looking forward to Weymouth -‘ I'm going south because the sun comes soonest in the south'. To quote a 1930's Southern Railway slogan. See, sentimentality again. I can't remember if Innovate had a slogan already.