Today is the last day that the Routemaster, the archetypal red London Bus dually staffed by a conductor and a cocooned driver, will run on Route 38 between Clapton Pond and Victoria Station. Anyone who has visited central London as a tourist and looked in a gift shop cannot be unaware of the form of this idolised vehicle: it appears on postcards alongside the obsolete photographs of Princess Diana and the ever-relevant images of naked breasts thinly disguised as the faces of pigs.

 

After work, as I walked to my bus stop in Islington, I passed many melancholic transport lovers recording the Routemaster's swansong on their digital cameras. The bus company itself (I am not sure whether this is Arriva, the private company controlling Route 38, or Transport for London, the umbrella body encompassing all LondonTransport) also treated the occasion with its deserved gravitas, bringing out some unusually exotic specimens of the type: I saw one bus with an outdoor stairway, a second with a concertina doorway, and a third with very bright interior lights that reminded me of a 19th century Russian ballroom. Such was my reverence and piety that I briefly considered getting on one and spending the evening in Hackney. But I discarded this idea, despite the allure that a single cigarette and a cheap bottle of brandy hold for me.

 

The Routemaster on Route 38 is to be replaced with a 'bendy bus', which is a single-deck articulated bus with three entrances. Passengers may enter at any door; they buy tickets from vending machines before boarding or touch their Oyster cards on readers located beside each door when they board. Customers with bus passes are not compelled to touch the Oyster readers. The bendy bus is the easiest bus to fare-dodge in the world. No-one observes whether passengers touch in, and if they don't, they have a plausible reason not to - that they have a bus pass - that is only verifiable by one of the rarely-seen inspectors. Transport for London, or Arriva, or whoever, can't have been motivated by potential revenue when they decided to put a bendy bus on Route 38, a service runs through the poor region of Hackney. Non-payment there is almost expected, as I discovered this summer when I was taken to court for alleged council tax evasion. There were so many people being charged for the same offence that we had to take raffle tickets to queue for our hearings, as higher class people do at deli counters. The only possible explanation for putting bendy buses on Route 38 is that the London authorities don't want to cut the standard of living in Hackney too much. With Routemasters, you could avoid payment altogether with carefully judged seating positions and disembarkations, and even if you stayed in place for the whole of your journey you only got charged about half the time.

 

The improbably named Travis Elborough has brought out a book called 'THE BUS WE LOVED: London's Affair with the Routemaster'. It's late October. Most people have at least one relative obsessed with London transport. May I, with what limited influence I hold, recommend that you do not buy this book for that relative as a surprise Christmas present. If they want it they'll buy it or ask for it; if they don't, they won't.