These buses are not confined to London either, they appear up and down these fair isles (albeit not in red – that’s a London thing).
The obvious benefit of a double decker is you can fit in twice the passengers, so my question is, why don’t I see them in other countries? The only ones I ever see are the sightseeing sort in tourist hotspots, the kind with an open top deck. But otherwise, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one.
So…why? I’ve put this in IMHO as I don’t think there’s a single answer.
(Cue swathes of dopers from countries who use nothing else).
Transit agencies dislike double-decker buses because they are inefficient. Loading and unloading passengers from the upper level takes time, and of course they are inaccessible to handicapped people. It’s more efficient and accessible to run more buses (or stick them together into bendy buses) than to operate double deckers.
And in some cities they won’t fit through tunnels.
We have one in New Zealand which does a round trip from Queenstown to Arrowtown and is very popular. http://www.doubledeckerbus.co.nz/
Incidentally I’m gratified the double deckers are still built (presumably) and operated. A few years ago I read that London was no longer using them but hopefully that was wrong.
We never stopped using double decker buses. We did stop using the famous RouteMaster, which is the bus which allows you to hop on and off by virtue of having an open deck at the back. Our previous mayor replaced them with bendy buses, which everyone loathed as they got stuck going around sharp corners and generally created traffic chaos. The current mayor has reintroduced a newly designed routemaster to replace the bendy buses.
That’s a real problem in the UK, our loading gauge is way out of step with European norms. The Channel Tunnel link into London is different, but that’s only a few tens of miles.
Anyway, I’m well into my forties, but on the odd occasion I get on a double-decker, I still love sitting at the front upstairs.
Of those objections, only the tunnel one really makes sense.
There is no additional time loading or unloading. An individual passenger may take more time to go from the door to their seat, but that isn’t time that others are waiting. In fact, I would go further than that and say IMO it is probably quicker to load/unload: with a single-decker bus, a queue of people may sometimes be held up while a slow passenger is temporarily blocking the aisle.
And double deckers are accessible to handicapped people and usually can be lowered so that people in wheelchairs can roll directly on. Of course such passengers can’t use the upper deck, but that doesn’t matter.
Perhaps part of it is that the movement within the bus from one level to another requires widely and strongly shared attitudes and habits regarding queueing and orderliness. If a right berk were ever so gauche as to violate The Queue, you would harrumph and tsk tsk at him in a frightfully rude manner, what?
Perhaps in low usage areas, bendy or double deckers don’t provide much more than regular buses. In high usage areas, it’s a question of whether twisty streets are more of a bother to bendies than tunnels and overpasses are to doubles. A lot of city roads may make it difficult but still possible for bendies to go where they please. Doubles may see their way completely blocked unless 50% casualty rates are acceptable.
I can appreciate that bendy buses hold more passengers and can load/unload more quickly – I think these were among the reasons London tried them out in the first place. But when traffic congestion is a problem, as it is in most major cities, I just can’t see the benefit of the additional road space it takes up.
And the UK is a land riddled with ancient obstacles like low-lying bridges. Presumably, the transport planners just alter the bus routes to avoid them.
In the United States, we have a really cheap long-distance bus carrier called Megabus that uses double decker buses. It has been alleged that they use inexperienced drivers in order to keep their prices low. These drivers get lost from time to time. While the approved routes are safe for the buses, when a driver gets lost, they obviously deviate from the approved routes and something like this can happen: Four are dead in Megabus crash on Onondaga Lake Parkway
As far a urban transit goes, passengers would rather have one little bus come by every 10 or 15 minutes than have one huge bus come by every two hours. Budget planners would prefer the latter of course, except for the fact that passengers would probably just give up and drive.
Yes, there are some bus routes that could fill up a huge bus every five minutes, but likely only during the peak of rush hour. That would leave the transit agency with huge buses that only got used 2 to 4 hours a day or would leave them paying to run huge buses all day with only a handful of passengers on them except for the peak.
Then trend I’ve observed is that the two local bus agencies have been buying smaller buses to run during the off-hours and to run on the routes far away from the central business district (particularly in the suburbs).
Yes - although things occasionally go wrong - a couple of times recently here in Portsmouth, double deckers have driven under a low bridge and sliced off the top.
In both cases, they were not-in-service buses being moved without passengers (obviously the route for passenger services is designed to avoid the low bridges, but when the buses are just being shuttled from depot to workshop or some such, the exact route is left to the driver.
