South goes Central - Route 38 New Routemaster conversion

As you all know, Route 38 have been given a full NRM conversion from 10th May 2014 and that's being used with it's current prototype NRM vehicles. These buses are now operated in OPO (One Person Operation) where the driver of the bus has the responsibility of controlling the bus with the rear platform closed off other than at bus stops but the rear platform door nearest to the back lights remain close as for health and safety reasons.

Believe it or not, the route (from the date of writing) the route is still not been fully converted as it awaits further vehicles from Heysham Docks being delivered to either Ash Grove (AE) or Clapton (CT) garages where the route is operated out of.

(C) All rights reserved by LondonBuses67

As you may already know some of the 38's NRMs are painted in black for the Adidas promotion for the 2014 World Cup as part of the Year of the Bus celebrations this year. Below you will find the details of those black NRMs.

LT184, LT185, LT186, LT191, LT192, LT193, LT199, LT209, LT201, LT203, LT204, LT206, LT209, LT210, LT213, LT214, LT215, LT218, LT220, LT221, LT222 and LT238.

Below you will find more of the 38's NRM production type vehicles that are in service I've snapped.

(C) All rights reserved by LondonBuses67

(C) All rights reserved by LondonBuses67

(C) All rights reserved by LondonBuses67

Hackney's best performing route is Route 38 which as you can see runs from Clapton Pond to Victoria Station has the highest peak vehicle requirement in London, requiring approximately seventy buses to accommodate it's frequency of every two minutes within a great distance of seven miles. To avoid bunching on route, Arriva London North subsidiary curtails every other bus on route to Hackney Central near Clapton (CT) garage which half house the route with Ash Grove (AE), this therefore decreases bunching of buses at both ends of the terminal.

Looking back at the route's past it never used to be a frequent when it had the Mercedes Benz Citaro O530G articulated buses which allowed the route's peak vehicle requirement to be only forty seven buses. These articulated buses were introduced under Ken Livingstone (ex Labour Mayor of London) who pledged to increase the capacity of the buses but at the same time decreasing the boarding time as the buses had three doors all with Oyster Card readers.

Unfortunately, Ken Livingstone lost power in 2008's mayoral election when he was defeated to Boris Johnson (also re-elected in 2012) where he said that Ken's buses were not suitable and unreliable for service in London as the buses were 18m long causing a utter mayhem in London's streets. Furthermore, Boris Johnson also said that these buses contribute to huge fare evasion in TFL which leads to the organisation losing millions of pounds as people treated the buses as "Free Buses" with homeless people seen boarding them.

This spark a fiery political row over Boris and Ken as to how to sort out London's growing population to transport people across the capital from A to B. However things did not go get resolved as Boris started to get rid of the articulated buses within his first year in office at City Hall where the 507 and 521 gained 12m Mercedes Benz Citaro before the 38 gained new Wright Gemini 2 DL and Alexander Dennis Enviro 400 but the Alexander Dennis Enviro 400 was diverted to the 78 making it have a double deck conversion as the route suffered severe overcrowding back then under single deck operation. Instead to fill the gap Arriva ordered Wright Gemini 2 DL's to fill the gap making it's peak vehicle requirement the highest in London.

In 2012, Boris Johnson launched his campaign to replace the Ken's buses with his own New Routemaster which was criticised by Darren Johnson (Green AM) who said that the buses were a vanity project and costed for too expensive wasting taxpayers money. Indeed, I personally agree that Darren Johnson was right on his point over the criticism Boris Johnson had as the buses were indeed expensive however things doesn't better for Boris Johnson as he's basically a hypocrite for trying to end fare evasion on Ken's bus when his own bus had Oyster Card readers causing a return for a huge damage done to TFL with them getting less money from fares to invest in the transport infrastructure.

Furthermore, Boris Johnson fought back by pleading to have passenger assistants to help avoid fare evasion and help passengers but this to cost expensive for TFL and therefore the idea is now withdrawn with routes being operated in one person operation giving him much more criticism over the future of London's transport and more importantly avoiding fare evasion. In fact fare evasion does happen on the 507 and 521 as they have Oyster Card readers for their buses and this again rises the issue that is not resolved caused by the introduction of articulated and/or new routemaster buses.
To conclude on the political row, this aim to end the fare evasion caused by Ken's buses had failed as they both simply failed to stop it and instead to pay for it Boris Johnson from 2008 raised the fares up every year above inflation to pay for it and now it's up approximately over 50% which is unbelievably disgusting and horrendous.

As of my personal view on the New Routemaster (Borismaster) I think it's worth the cost for the criticism for how expensive the bus was but there is downsides to the bus. The New Routemaster impressingly has three doors, two staircase which also slows down the boarding time of the bus which is good but the buses don't have openable windows. This therefore causes a huge issue during the Summer with free water bottles handed out to passengers as the air cooling on the bus wasn't great if it didn't work but even so it's not enough making this a huge downside to the project in the first place. Another downside would be that the buses have no passenger assistants due to it being too expensive to pay to have them as well as the open platform being opened causing risk in deaths in the road.

To conclude on the buses, I personally do like the buses but unfortunately there are many downsides to the bus which makes this bus not as worth as the normal conventional buses we have such as the Alexander Dennis Enviro 400 etc.

To be honest, the conversion on the route was not as great as many were anticipating for but again most understand that even though the conversion wasn't great the route would still be Hackney's best performing route as well as one of the routes in London with the best high frequency service. 

Fleetlist
LT172 LTZ 1172
LT173 LTZ 1173
LT174 LTZ 1174
LT175 LTZ 1175
LT176 LTZ 1176 - Currently out of service due to recent incident on N38.
LT177 LTZ 1177
LT178 LTZ 1178
LT179 LTZ 1179
LT180 LTZ 1180
LT181 LTZ 1181
LT182 LTZ 1182
LT183 LTZ 1183
LT184 LTZ 1184
LT185 LTZ 1185
LT186 LTZ 1186
LT187 LTZ 1187
LT188 LTZ 1188
LT189 LTZ 1189
LT190 LTZ 1190
LT191 LTZ 1191
LT192 LTZ 1192
LT193 LTZ 1193
LT194 LTZ 1194
LT195 LTZ 1195
LT196 LTZ 1196
LT197 LTZ 1197
LT198 LTZ 1198
LT199 LTZ 1199
LT200 LTZ 1200
LT201 LTZ 1201
LT202 LTZ 1202
LT203 LTZ 1203
LT204 LTZ 1204
LT205 LTZ 1205
LT206 LTZ 1206
LT207 LTZ 1207
LT208 LTZ 1208
LT209 LTZ 1209
LT210 LTZ 1210
LT211 LTZ 1211
LT212 LTZ 1212
LT213 LTZ 1213
LT214 LTZ 1214
LT215 LTZ 1215
LT216 LTZ 1216
LT217 LTZ 1217
LT218 LTZ 1218
LT219 LTZ 1219
LT220 LTZ 1220
LT221 LTZ 1221
LT222 LTZ 1222
LT223 LTZ 1223
LT224 LTZ 1224
LT225 LTZ 1225
LT226 LTZ 1226
LT227 LTZ 1227
LT228 LTZ 1228
LT229 LTZ 1229
LT230 LTZ 1230
LT231 LTZ 1231
LT232 LTZ 1232
LT233 LTZ 1233
LT234 LTZ 1234

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