On 17th September 2014, Central London held an event about the innovative green technology being implemented in the new Routemaster buses. The speaker, Leon Daniels, has been working in the bus industry for over 40 years. He is currently the Managing Director of Surface Transport and has involvements in the transport elements of the Olympic Games. We caught up with Leon at the event.
Can you tell me a little bit about yourself?
I’m Leon Daniels, Managing Director of Surface Transport at Transport for London. It’s a job I have been doing for 3 and half years. In my past I have worked for the government, shipping, publishing and I fell into transport by accident. As soon as I got into transport I realised that I loved it; during the course of my time I ran sight-seeing buses here in London, I was one of the first private-sector bus operators when the first London bus contracts were let in the 1980’s. My company has been owned by various people including people in Hong Kong, it was owned by my management team and I and in due course we sold it to First Group. I agreed to stay at First Group for 6 months to see everything in, in fact I stayed 13 years. I had several nice jobs within First Group both within the UK and overseas. I might still have been at First Group if this wonderful opportunity to be Managing Director of Surface Transport hadn’t come along at TfL in 2011. It was a great opportunity for me to run the transport during the London Olympics and to oversee all of the surface transport in these really exciting times.
What are the key research areas or hot topics?
The big hot topics here in London are driven by the Mayor’s transport strategy. We are very big on cycling at the moment by trying to make sure we provide more cycling facilities in London for the huge number of cyclists that we increasingly have on our roads. We need to make sure that the cyclists are safe, so we are currently reconfiguring a lot of London’s roads to provide much better facilities on the roads and at junctions. That’s really very important for us because the cyclists cycling is good for your health and it is good for London’s air quality.
There are lots of other things going on; London is in the middle of a huge amount of construction. There is lots of work going on such as new buildings, new homes and new factories which means we have a big increase in traffic. One of our jobs is to make sure we keep the traffic moving so we are using technology wherever we can to get more traffic through our roads. We are doing that by using really clever technology in order to refine the traffic signal timings, we have a pedestrian countdown now to tell people how long they have left to cross the road. This means we get more compliance by pedestrians at crossings which in turn mean we get more traffic through.
We are working very hard with our bus fleet in order to improve the emissions to give us greater control of the buses to use them more efficiently. Above all, we are making sure that buses are able to cope with the big increase in passenger’s year on year. We have as many buses running in London now as we did in the late 1950’s which id a record high. More than half the bus journeys in the UK are now taking place on buses in London.
We also have other air quality agenda items to do with the taxi fleet, also with freight to make sure that freight is delivered efficiently. There is no point in having a wonderful economy if there’s no food in the shops or if there isn’t any furniture in the stores. So we are making sure that there are goods ready for people to buy when shopping in London.
How is the new bus for London greener and can you tell us about the changes to the engine?
The mayor’s new bus for London was created as a result of a competition that he launched in 2008. The best designers and manufacturers around the world got together in a competition in order to design the first new bus for London for about 50 years. In those intervening 50 years in London we’ve bought ‘off the peg’ buses made by the manufacturers. We wanted a bus that was special for London.
The new Routemaster as 3 doors, 2 staircases, it’s over 11 metres long and is a beautiful bus to drive and ride on. It looks absolutely gorgeous because it was designed by Thomas Heatherwick who also designed the Olympic Cauldron. It’s smart in other ways as well; it has the best green credentials of any bus in the UK. It is delivering fabulous fuel economy; over 35% improvement in fuel economy. It’s a diesel electric hybrid; it has a small engine in the back running at a constant speed, charging the batteries which drive the electric motor. In some of our dense, urban areas we are able to run on battery power and the rest of the time the engine is working like a generator. We started with Euro 5 and that has been working very well. We have just made the transition to Euro 6 leaving even less emission. There are 250 buses currently on the streets of London; by 2016 there will be over 600 buses so wherever you go in London you can see one for sure.