Mayor Boris Johnson has ordered transport bosses to consider changes to the design of his flagship New Routemaster bus in the face of ongoing passenger complaints about the temperature inside the vehicles.
Instead of featuring standard opening windows in keeping with the rest of London’s bus fleet, the new vehicle relies in an air-cooling system to control the internal temperature.
Since the bus entered passenger service in 2012 there have been complaints about the effectiveness of the system, with passengers complaining on social media and to London Assembly Members about stifling heat and uncomfortable travelling conditions.
Transport for London initially denied any fallings with the system but have since placed heat sensors on some buses to help monitor temperatures in the upper-saloon.
Last October it emerged that TfL and manufacturer Wrightbus were exploring adding “insulation around areas such as the engine compartment, improved ventilation and remote monitoring of saloon temperatures” on a new batch of 200 vehicles.
However passengers on the existing vehicles continue to complain about the conditions they’re forced to travel in.
Boris Johnson has now confirmed that TfL has been asked “to work with Wrightbus to look again at possible design options to improve comfort across the New Routemaster fleet.”
The information came in response to a question from Green Party London Assembly Member Darren Johnson who said passengers had recorded “temperatures of 36 degrees and above” on the vehicles.
Mr Johnson AM says that “unless TfL can add some opening windows and address other passenger and environmental concerns, these Roastmasters are simply not be fit for the future and will have no place on London’s streets during the summer months in years to come.”
Dave H says
To use the term Routemaster is an insult to the original design, which produced one of the lightest buses ever for London’s streets, with a monocoque body that was modular and thus expandable*, and used sub frame units to mount engine and transmission, making it easy in later years to fit modern low emission engines and automatic transmissions. We’ve grown from the RM (4 bays) to the RML (4.5 bays) and now some buses have been rebuilt to RMX (5 bays) as the length limits have been increased.
The Routemaster had great manoeuvreabilty and can be easily turned around in a tight space – by contrast the action to manage down bus speeds entering Euston Bus Station and reduce the pedestrian crossing width was limited by the need to operate in and out with the new bus for London (sic), which sets the limits for reduced road geometry.
A cooling system will only work if the condenser in the circuit can cool down the hot, compressed refrigerant so that it can be released through a nozzle as a pressurised liquid into the evaporator where the latent heat of evaporation has to be drawn from somewhere and should come from the saloon as the evaporator gets cooled by the fluid refrigerant evaporating. If the condenser gets too hot it ceases to take heat away and instead puts heat back via the evaporator in to the saloon. remove the bus from the hot city streets where this happens and test the system – perhaps back inside a cooler bus garage and naturally it will work as designed.
For this reason most sensibly designed air conditioned vehicles have lockable opening windows, which can be unlocked for the days when the heat overwhelms the normal working of the system. TfL specified this for the new trains on London Overground. A pity the same thinking did not get applied to the new buses?