If that's the case, re that club not liking Spaniards, they could be done for racial discrumination!!!!

With you all the way re. bendy buses and some of their drivers. Why is Ken Livingstone not lying dead in the road, having said that Routemasters would be withdrawn "over my dead body"?

And mine are often very difficult to explain. Different hand , different finger, in this case.

Fossilised fish-hooks! I can be slow on the uptake sometimes . I've finally understood what Bryn's occasional blue letters are all about. 

Many, if not actually most, of the London routes on which bendy buses are used, were formerly served by double decker buses. Modern models of such buses could replace bendy buses on such routes. It was not the Routemaster, as in RM, RML ,as such that was so useful, but the open rear loading design aspect, which requires a conductor. Let me make it clear, interesting and fun as it is behid the wheel of an RM, I would pick a modern double decker every time, when it comes to driving in London traffic. The Routemaster was designed in-house by London Transport to suit the particular needs of London's road network, what's needed is a modern bus designed from scratch to suit today's London road traffic system. You don't have to be a Tory to agree with Mr. B. Johnson's traffic policy advisors, that a new 'Routemaster' is what is needed.

Though I doubt it very much myself, I know a number of bus users and operators who are convinced that Ken literally sold out to the bendy bus suppliers.

I can't see the private companies who now operate routes on behalf of London Buses agreeing to bring back conductors on to their payrolls, without hefty payments up front from TfL, especially since most people now have Oyster cards.

And it is difficult to see how a London-only bus design could work without a conductor, given that one of the main advantages of the bendy bus is the ability to get large numbers of people on and off quickly, and the only way you could achieve this on the double-decker is to return to the open platform at the back.  Health and safety considerations (and the fear of being sued) have moved on a long way since the days when Norf Lunnon kids like me used to jump off the open platform on the way to school, to the point where it seems unlikely that bus companies would want to leave an open platform unattended.

So, despite the Boris Johnson rhetoric, I think bendy buses are here to stay.  And it is interesting that Boris refuses to give a straight answer to questions about how much a dedicated London bus would cost, and who would pay for it.  This looks like being one of those commitments that is very easy for Boris to give on the stump but from which he would run a mile in office.

Bryn, I think that what I was, rather unsucessfully, trying to convey Not the best job in the world. I have seen passengers behave unreasonably towards bus drivers. Although part of me is still smarting after a bus driver chucked me off a bus because my Oyster card had run out of loot. Even though I offered the cash fare   Still, petrol under the, um, wotsit. Innit?