倫敦新巴士爭議聲中上街服役
倫敦新型隨上隨下公交巴士車將推廣到多條線路
醞釀和渲染已久的倫敦新巴士Routemaster周一（2月27日）正式上街開始服役，比計劃推遲了一周。
首先啟用新車組的是東倫敦哈克尼（Hackney）到倫敦市中心維多利亞（Victoria）的38路公交線路。
這款仍有較大爭議的巴士據稱是因為公文程序未及時完成而錯過了原定推出期限。
工黨、自民黨和綠黨異口同聲地批評屬於保守黨的倫敦市長鮑里斯·約翰遜（Boris Johnson）的新巴士計劃花銷太大。
不過，約翰遜為自己的「心肝寶貝」Routemaster辯解，稱它「美輪美奐」，而且「各個細節特色都是為倫敦乘客量身定制的」。
隨上隨下
約翰遜在2008年競選倫敦市長職位時宣佈了將用全新設計、符合環保的油電混合型大巴，採用傳統的在後部開「隨上隨下」（hop-on, hop-off）車門。
啟用的第一階段，38路公交線總共有8輛新巴士，投資總額是1137萬英鎊。
新車組的首班車周一上午發車。
工黨國會議員戴維·拉米（David Lammy）給約翰遜寫信抱怨說，每一輛新車成本是140萬英鎊，而傳統的雙層巴士只要19萬英鎊；每輛車上62個座位，平均下來每個座位成本是22580英鎊。
如此算來，Routemaster可以說是有史以來最貴的公交汽車了。
車票漲價
綠黨更關注新車的隨上隨下功能可能導致更多人逃票，希望知道約翰遜有沒有制訂有效對策。
這個問題關係到承包倫敦公交服務的巴士公司是否願意投資購買這款新車來取代原來的巴士，因為到了更新車隊出售這些巴士時，這個環節可能使得潛在的買家望而卻步。
自民黨乾脆把新巴士計劃說得一文不值，稱約翰遜不可能通過新巴士為自己改善倫敦公交服務加分；他所成就的不過是讓倫敦的巴士車票漲價50%。
約翰遜面對各方批評指責立場堅定地說，只要有大批的訂單，這款新車就能為製造業做出重大經濟貢獻，同時也有助於營造一個更清潔、更環保、更令人愉快的城市。
6555萬打造 復古雙層紅巴再現倫敦 【2012/2/28 19:51】
「Routemaster」又有「Boris Bus」的綽號，就是來自倫敦市長包瑞斯強森的名字，不過包括英國工黨、自民黨和綠黨等人士，一致批評包瑞斯強森鋪張浪費。一輛雙層紅巴成本是約新台幣6555萬元，啟用第一階段總計有8輛車上路，耗資超過新台幣5.2億。
對照之下，其他傳統的雙層巴士，造價約只有19萬英鎊（約新台幣890萬元）雙層紅巴也被稱為是英國有史以來最貴的公車。
被評為太貴，但其實雙層紅巴也有一些特色讓包瑞斯強森自豪，包括每輛車上多達62個座位，加上25個站位約可容納87位乘客；後門設計可讓乘客「隨上隨下」；符合環保的油電混合型。
包瑞斯強森相信，雙層紅巴能振興製造業，且有助改善倫敦，讓倫敦成為一個更清潔、更環保、更令人愉快的城市。
Design
British Design: Not What It Used to Be
LONDON — Strikes. Disappearing letters. Shuttered post offices. Irritatingly long queues and suspicious smells in the survivors. There are (sadly) lots of reasons for the British to indulge in the popular national pastime of grumbling about the Royal Mail this summer.
Multimedia
The appearance last week of a new series of Royal Mail stamps to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the postbox should have struck a cheerier tone. Even the grouchiest grumblers agree that old-fashioned mailboxes are among the most popular symbols of Britain, and share many characteristics of the country’s other design icons.
One is that they come in a rousing shade of red, like the K2 telephone kiosk and Routemaster double-decker bus. Another is that they have the gutsy, no-nonsense engineering aesthetic of the K2, Routemaster and other national design gems, including the Concorde and Spitfire fighter jet. (The French tend to favor elegant icons, like the delicate Art Nouveau ironwork of the Paris subway and those dainty blue and white enamel street signs, but the pretension-phobic British prefer theirs to look pragmatic.) And like so many other jewels of Britain’s design heritage, the postbox is not what it used to be.
In fairness to the Royal Mail (not that I feel like doing it any favors in light of its other recent offenses), the design standards of mailboxes have not plunged quite as precipitously as those of phone booths and buses. The latest designs are unforgivably mediocre, but are neither as ugly as the shabby vandal-magnets that now pass for telephone kiosks, nor as dysfunctional as the lethally long “bendy buses,” which were imported to Britain from Germany to become objects of national hatred, alongside tax inspectors, bonus-grabbing bankers and expense-fiddling politicians. Why have so many British design treasures been so badly neglected?
There are some boringly obvious logistical reasons. The “change for change’s sake” syndrome among ambitious executives in an era of ever-decreasing corporate life expectancy makes them feel compelled to meddle with perfectly good designs to make an impact or, better still (in their eyes, at least), to replace them with something new. They then bungle the process of making modifications or choosing replacements by dint of any or all of the following: cowardice, laziness, lack of imagination, delegating decision-making to committees or focus groups (even though the result is bound to be compromised) and plain ineptitude.
None of these problems are limited to public design projects. They are routine corporate crimes that bedevil every area of design, and explain why we end up with other disasters, like inoperable cellphones, illegible instruction manuals, neurotically overstyled espresso machines and landfill sites bloated with indestructible, non-biodegradable rubbish. But their impact is greater when applied to public commissions, because mailboxes, phone booths and the like are so much more visible. Not only are there lots of them, they tend to be big and to be used by many people, not just individuals. If you analyze the design deficiencies of the average cellphone, they are depressingly similar to those of a Royal Mail postbox, but the latter will be seen by millions of people, regardless of whether or not they actually use it, while the phone will seem conspicuous only to its luckless owner.
All of this could, of course, be avoided, if the designers, and the people who commission them, were better equipped to do their jobs. Throughout design history, almost every national design coup was initiated by a stellar patron, not just in Britain, but other countries, too. Take Frank Pick, who made London Transport a model of modern design management in the early 1900s. Many of his innovations, like Harry Beck’s 1933 diagrammatic London Underground map and Edward Johnston’s 1916 roundel symbol, are still in use today. Pick oversaw everything, traveling around the network on rare “nights off” to check that it was perfect. Even the Routemaster, which was commissioned after his retirement, owes much to his legacy.
None of the people currently running London Transport come close to matching Pick’s dynamism, nor do their peers at the Royal Mail or British Telecom, and they tend to choose designers of their own mettle (or lack of it).
There is another problem, which is specific to public projects. An essential quality of a national design gem is that it reflects the country’s culture. The neo-classical dome of the K2 telephone kiosk symbolized Britain’s attachment to tradition and ambivalence toward modernity in the 1920s, just as the Routemaster’s can-do style captured the determination of the postwar era.
It was easier for designers to accomplish this then than it is today, when Britain’s national identity seems so much more complex, diverse and contradictory than it did in the 1920s and 1940s. Those eras had their complexities, too, but there was less inclination to recognize them, and it is simpler for designers to articulate a clearly defined message, than ambiguity.
This goes some way to explaining why so few new design jewels have emerged, although the shortcomings of the current postboxes, phone booths and most other flops are down to bad design, rather than doomed attempts to reflect the confusion of modern life. The achingly embarrassing London 2012 Olympics logo succeeds in doing that, but is also ugly and inappropriate.
And success is possible, as Matthew Dent proved with his designs for Britain’s new coins, which were introduced last year by the Royal Mint. The backs of the 50-, 20-, 10-, 5- and 2-pence and 1-penny coins bear fragments of the 14th-century Shield of the Royal arms. When those coins are placed together the shield appears intact, as it does on the back of the £1 coin. By fracturing an emblem of British history and reunifying it, Mr. Dent created a sensitive and appealing symbol of contemporary Britain, which has proved so popular that the Royal Mint has run short of coins, because people are keeping, rather than spending, them.
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