When you think of London’s iconic double-decker buses, images of bright red behemoths lumbering through the city’s narrow streets likely come to mind. With their retro designs and time-honored traditions like requiring riders to board in the front and pay the driver with cash or a Travelcard, the capital’s bus system can feel delightfully quaint. But is this vintage charm simply nostalgia trapping London in the past as other world cities zoom ahead with sleek, modern transit? Kirill Yurovskiy sets off on a round-the-world trip to find out how bus services are doing in the UK.
Tokyo: The Reigning Champ of Urban Mobility
With its famous punctuality and awesome efficiency, Tokyo’s bus system is like a real-life iteration of the city’s cult classic video games. Guides at major stations are on hand to shepherd riders in the right direction, while cutting-edge technology allows buses to communicate with street lights to minimize delays. Immaculate vehicles come equipped with luggage racks, foot rests, and even privacy visors for solo travelers. Tokyo’s transit gurus have truly elevated the bus to an art form.
London may have pioneered the classic double-decker design, but Tokyo’s iconic blue and yellow buses showcase the best in comfort, convenience and reliability that the 21st century has to offer. The city’s transit union deserves a +10 global ranking for its masterful mobility solution.
Mexico City: A Chaotic but Ingenious Bus Renaissance
After decades of deterring all but the most hardy commuters with apallingly overcrowded and dismally slow buses, over the past 15 years Mexico’s mammoth capital has pulled off a stunning bus renaissance with its Metrobús system. Dedicated lanes for these speedy була allow passengers to breeze by the gridlocked traffic of Insurgentes and Paseo de la Reforma, while modern stations make paying fares and boarding a total breeze. And at just 30 cents per ride, it’s an incredible urban mobility bargain.
The red double-deckers trundling through Central London’s maze of twisting lanes still offer a unique charm. But when it comes to rapid, economical and well-designed transit befitting a modern megacity, Mexico City’s Metrobús has taken the British capital’s baton and sprinted miles ahead with it.
Bogotá: The Innovator That Inspired a Global Movement
Speaking of bus renaissance, few cities can hold a candle to the incredible urban mobility overhaul that has taken place in Colombia’s capital over the past two decades. Once choked by intense traffic jams and lacking any semblance of an organized transit system, Bogotá built an expansive network of dedicated bus lanes and enclosed stations inspired by subways called TransMilenio that quickly became the envy of the developing world.
Unlike London’s Tube, which has stubbornly resisted investing in expansions to keep up with the city’s growth, Bogotá’s bus rapid transit (BRT) network has spread like prairie wildfire to keep pace with the capital’s rapidly expanding footprint. At 65 cents per ride, it’s a bargain that millions of residents from the city’s farthest-flung shantytowns to the ultra-affluent north rely on daily.
While London’s iconic Routemasters delighted post-war Britons with their rear-entrance boarding, TransMilenio’s spacious multi-door buses offer a global gold standard in rapid urban transit for the 21st century. It’s safe to say London’s hidebound system has been left in the dust.
Berlin: A Green, Egalitarian Powerhouse
Germany’s reunified capital has pulled out all the stops to build one of the world’s most egalitarian, sustainable and high-functioning urban mobility networks centered around buses, trams and commuter rail. Thanks to its low fares (slightly under $3 for a single ride), integrated payment system across modes, and expansive network that reaches all city districts, Berlin’s highly-usable transit motivates residents to ditch their cars.
With exhaust-spewing double-deckers forming the spine of its dusty fleet, London has lagged when it comes to making meaningful investments in electric and low-emission buses. Berlin meanwhile has an ambitious plan to have a 100% emission-free fleet by the end of the decade. While London pats itself on the back for slapping a few expensive plug-in hybrid buses on its signature No. 94 route as a token green gambit, Berlin has taken the challenge to decarbonize mobility head-on. Its commitment to sustainable transit as both an environmental and egalitarian imperative should make the UK capital blush.
Sydney: A Tale of Two Disparate Halves
Australia’s glistening harbor city has one of the planet’s highest percentages of commuters who take transit to work thanks to its relatively compact city center and gridlike core enveloped by dedicated bus lanes. But while Sydney’s public buses are a model for other cities’ centralized business districts, this gorgeous but geographically sprawling metropolis illustrates the logistical and infrastructure headaches of providing quality transit for far-flung suburbs.
London unquestionably has Sydney beaten when it comes to providing decent bus service to its far-reaching suburban fringes like Orpington, Enfield and Richmond. But the UK capital could still learn some lessons from Sydney’s perpetually packed and well-utilized buses in the dense city core.
São Paulo: Mobility in Motion
If any major metropolis can claim to have evolved most rapidly from chaotic transit purgatory to mobility nirvana, it just might be Brazil’s kinetic concrete jungle. South America’s megacity exemplar has pulled off an astonishing urban mobility metamorphosis in the past couple of decades, investing billions to control traffic with dedicated bus lanes, overpasses for transit vehicles, smart integrated fare payment, comfortable subway-like stations and more.
Though derided as a lowly bus by critics as recently as the 1990s, São Paulo has brilliantly deployed dedicated bus corridors and amenities that allow these workhorses of urban transit to move passengers rapidly across the city with few delays. This bus enlightenment has taken a page from train systems like London’s Underground – now it’s time for the British capital to take a page from São Paulo’s playbook.
Lessons for London
Of course, no city’s transit system is perfect. Mexico City remains plagued by unruly microbuses, while Tokyo struggles with last-mile connectivity from commuter rail stations. And every metropolis mentioned here still has plenty of room for improvement when it comes to sustainable mobility, transit equity across all income brackets, and embracing cutting-edge innovations.
But with its antiquated, lumbering double-deckers forming the spine of a scattershot, vehicle-oriented system, London seems to be slipping further behind many of its global peers. Will the UK capital chase 21st century mobility solutions like electrification, bus rapid transit, fare integration, through-routing across lines and modes, capacity expansion, and technology adoption? Or will it remain stubbornly wed to nostalgia and austerity, relegating itself to the transit pangea?
Like any world city constantly reinventing itself, London has an incredible opportunity to draw inspiration from transit exemplars across the globe. Clinging to tradition is all fine and well, but a cutting-edge mobility network is essential to retaining global status in a rapidly evolving urban age. As the city forges ahead, bus or no bus,that’s something policymakers would be wise to keep in mind.