Red bus or white elephant?

When he was Mayor of London, one of Boris Johnson's several expensive follies was to commission a new Routemaster bus. Thomas Heatherwick, who designed the cauldron in which the Olympic flame at the 2012  London Olympics was lit, was engaged to design the bus. The brief was to include an open rear platform so, as in the old days, people could jump on and off the bus - something I regularly used to do if the bus was held up and I wasn't near a bus stop.The problem with the new design was that it wasn't an open rear platform, it had doors. And, as the buses did not have conductors, the drivers kept the doors closed between stops. So, frustratingly, the idea of recreating the old style jump on/jump off bus never got off the ground. Happily one can still enjoy the real thing by taking one of the original "legacy" Routemasters that still run on a few central London routes. The number 15 Routemaster runs from Trafalgar Square to St Paul's Cathedral and is a very evocative trip in a legendary example of the best of public transport.