A London-based company is offering an alternative mass transit mode designed to address fears about coronavirus infection risks on public transport: a commuter service using open-topped buses.
On-demand bus company Snap is currently testing a new offering that would transport Londoners to and from work in some of the city’s 233 roofless tourist buses. These are those double-deckers with an open-air upper deck, used in cities worldwide to ferry sightseers about on “hop-on, hop-off” routes.
Though most of the London fleet is currently parked due to an absence of visitors; Snap is hoping to redeploy the open-topped tourist buses as Covid-safe pop-up transportation for locals.
The service is still in development. Snap is currently going through a crowdsourcing process, taking details of people interested in the service to calculate which routes might have highest demand. Initial test journeys ran last month following the route of the London Underground’s Victoria Line, which runs across central London from northeast to southwest.
Prices are expected to run at the same cost as an average tube journey – £3.30 – with multiple pick-up and drop-off points for passengers but far fewer stops than the average bus. Snap has estimated that it can run a viable service at that cost with passengers filling just a quarter of a bus’s usual capacity, a level that would make it possible for everyone to sit on the upper deck and maintain some distance from each other. Frequent cleanings after each trip would further mitigate risk.
“The Tube in London is currently at 30% of its usage before the pandemic, while car use is at about 80% of where it was pre-pandemic” said Snap CEO Thomas Ableman. “We really don’t want a car-based recovery to this crisis, so we need to find solutions that people are comfortable with – and you can’t get a more Covid-secure means of transport than an open-topped bus.”
