"Even putting conducters back on these buses would pay for itself I am sure!!?"Sure? Let's do the maths, this came up during the Mayoral campaign.Bendies, apparently, suffer from three times the non-payment rate (anecdotal evidence is unreliable here, since many people don't actually have to swipe anything, only Oyster PAYG users, and the figure for bus PAYG users is 40-50% from memory). This was estimated even by the most rabid bendy-haters to be £10m a year, given the relatively small percentage of the total bus fleet that's bendy.The cost of putting conductors on bendy buses was estimated by Boris Johnson's campaign at £8m, which was immediately shot down as entirely nonsensical, since it was calculated on a) replacing all the bendies with the same number of much smaller vehicles (thus inconveniencing people who just want to move around, who now find themselves either on grossly overcrowded vehicles or left behind)b) hiring sufficient conductors to staff these vehicles 1/3 of the time they'd be in service, which means you'd either have to cut the number of much smaller buses running by 66% or not have conductors 66% of the time.Once the cost of extra buses for capacity, extra drivers for the extra buses, plus the conductors, plus cover for three shifts per bus per day were taken into account the cost went up to about £110m per year extra, which (given how TfL is funded) either comes from the London farepayer or general UK taxation. Mr. Darling is certainly not going to give you the money, so it's the farepayer who'll pay.All of which begs the question - is your anger at freeloaders sufficient to pay the extra whack per bus journey (and, indeed, force the rest of us to as well) it would cost to stop them (or, more accurately, reduce the fare evasion to the level experienced on conventional buses), or is there a better way than simplistically screaming 'scrap them'?Unfortunately, transport economics is a discipline that looks kindly on people who understand cold, hard maths, and fundamentally most people who use public transport think this way too, particularly when someone puts 20p a journey on the bus fare.
Thomas Barry ● 6110d