New Bus for London—just when you’ve lost count of the number of appearances in the press & online and you finally thought people had given up the “me too” reports of London’s soon-to-be new bus, there appears no abatement.
We still can’t really see the point of a bespoke London product but we still like that design. At its launch we said, “Whatever this bus is, it isn’t just another double deck”. Tucked away on page five of yesterday’s The Times Saturday Review was an interesting piece on the bus they incorrectly dub the Routemaster. Writer Stephen Bayley looked at NB4L from a single perspective, its design. Here are some quotes from him:
“Is Heatherwick’s new version iconic? Too early to say. Is it a very good piece of work? Certainly”
“The back end of a bus has become a design statement”
Scrapping the (original) Routemaster “was as if Big Ben had been turned into the Westminster Ikea”.On the other hand, we have:
“There is really very little in design that is genuinely new. It’s always a question of survival or revival”.One of Bayley’s quotes is crying out to be includes in an essay question for the chartership exams of the Chartered Institute of Transport (assuming they still charter people by examination).
‘ “The bus market is a very conservative one.” Discuss.’
5 comments:
wot no rear windows upstairs?
Perhaps we shouldn't get too excited until an actual prototype appears. I may wrong, but I have a feeling that there will be a number of differences between the computer generated images and the solid object.
They certainly do! In the middle of my Strategic Operations work at the moment - ah what are Sunday's for?
Has anyone seen an internal layout (e.g. seats, luggage, pushchair space) yet? Or is it only the sexy outside that matters?
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