Under new management: buses 2000 - 2020

In 2000 TfL’s remit included London Buses, Tramlink, River Services, Victoria Coach Station, Docklands Light Railway, Public Carriage Office and Street Management. The Underground joined them in 2003. 

TfL was already working to deliver a fully accessible bus fleet, but the growth in passenger numbers meant buses also had to be bigger. So it was that Livingstone became closely associated with the continental-style articulated single deck Mercedes Benz Citaro, known to most as the ‘Bendy Bus’. Eventually 300 of these specially adapted and extended vehicles were in operation on most of London’s main arterial roads.  

While promoting the Citaro, Livingstone also made plain his dislike for the old-fashioned inaccessible Routemaster, finally taking them off the streets in December 2005. The Conservative challenger in the Mayoral election of 2008, Boris Johnson, declared himself to be an admirer of the Routemaster and the implacable enemy of the Citaro, promising that he would banish them in turn, which he did three years later.  

In the meantime, Johnson launched a competition to design a new iconic London bus based on the Routemaster - the New Bus for London or NBfL. The winning design by Heatherwick Studios included superficial cosmetic nods to the 1950s original. Heatherwick teamed up with Wrightbus in Northern Ireland to produce a hybrid diesel/electric vehicle, which became known as the New Routemaster. 1000 New RMs were built, but following the election of Labour’s Sadiq Khan in 2016, future orders were cancelled.   

Electronic information brought significant change to the bus landscape in this period. In the 1990s, the Countdown system had been introduced to central London bus stops, providing electronic route information. In 2000, this was rolled out to a wider range of bus stops London-wide.  

During the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio, event results from Channel 4 were relayed to bus stops in real time.  

This system received a further boost when TfL started trialling the iBus system in 2006. The satellite-based system tracks the locations of buses in real time, to provide on-board automated dot matrix information and audio announcements telling passengers what route they are on, its destination and current position. This is now installed on all London buses, and the Countdown bus stop information is also now 100% accurate.  

In 2011 TfL started providing this data free to web and smartphone app developers. This became a formal policy for all TfL service data in 2014, so the information is now available in many forms. Payment has also gone digital, first with Oyster, then bank cards, followed by the elimination of cash payments and paper tickets on buses altogether in 2014.  

Since the early 2000s environmental challenges have been a key concern of TfL and successive Mayors. Under Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London since 2016, TfL has promised that all new double-deck buses would be hybrid, electric or hydrogen. The focus is on the greenest, cleanest buses, and the Mayor has spent millions to transform London’s bus fleet by retrofitting thousands of buses with ultra low emission engines. There is also a commitment to phase out pure diesel double-deck buses entirely in the coming years.

London’s electric bus fleet is now the largest in Europe, with more than 200 vehicles and plans for more. Khan has also established 12 Low Emission Bus Zones, putting the greenest buses on the capital’s most polluted routes.