Boris Johnson has vowed that his first act as Mayor of London will be to scrap bendy buses and replace them with a modern-day Routemaster. Mr Johnson said that the controversial buses were abused by fare dodgers and highly dangerous to cyclists.
Speaking at the first Tory candidates hustings meeting, the MP for Henley said that he would introduce a new version of the Routemaster bus that had been axed by Ken Livingstone. Their replacement would be fully accessible for the disabled and mothers with buggies. He said: "We should on day one, act one, scene one, hold a competition to get rid of the bendy bus. They wipe out cyclists, there are many cyclists killed every year by them.
"It's not beyond the wit of man to design a new Routemaster which will stand as an icon of this city."
Mr Johnson also said that he would stand up for the "many" in London who depended on their car and vowed to spend more of the congestion charge on repairing roads, particularly outside the centre of the city. Just £10 million of the nearly £1 billion raised by the congestion charge had gone on improving roads, he said. In a question and answer session in Westminster last night, the Tory front-runner also called for all ethnic minority communities in London to have a "good command of English".
He said: "It's tragic that there are people in the second and third generations who still don't speak English. "If you don't speak English, you cannot take part in the economy and that's one of the reasons those communities are doing badly."
EVENING STANDARD, London, 12 September 2007.
Not the New Routemaster
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