Dave Hill: Will Boris Johnson's Routemaster dream reach its terminus?

The mayor of London's competition to design a successor to the famous bus will soon be launched. A great deal hangs on its result No issue in his campaign to become London's mayor highlighted more vividly Boris Johnson's dizzy blondness than his "New Routemaster" bus policy. It began as a populist pledge to replace the articulated or "bendy" buses introduced under his predecessor with a "21st century" descendant of the old Routemaster, the famous, nay legendary, London double-decker. It ended up a flagship with a tattered sail. Johnson first got his numbers wrong on the cost of employing conductors then demonstrated with dazzling consistency a total inability to get his story straight on any aspect of the project's likely costs. Some experts even wrote that no such bus was feasible. It was, then, a bit cheeky of Johnson to... [read full story]