Double-deck bus trouble in NY

It's not a very promising beginning to a news story to say that a mistake which could cost the city of New York several million dollars to repair was made several years ago, but the blundering outfit in question, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is embarrassed enough by the ludicrous facts that have come to light not to pinpoint the original error more precisely than a novelist.

Anyway, it says here, several years ago the transportation authority ordered eight new street buses from England. They were to cost – and since I read the Pentagon's alarming record of what they call 'overrun' in costs, I stress they 'were' to cost, God knows what by now they have cost – $99,000 each or, just about, by today's exchange, half a million pounds altogether. This order, by the way, was never questioned, even in Washington where the federal government agreed to put up half the money. This must certainly have been before New York's mammoth budget problems. If the order had been place this year, I'm pretty sure that President Ford would be seizing on it as a campaign issue, citing it as a shocking example of the spendthrift Democratic Congress. 

Well, the buses duly arrived and they are supposed to start running next Wednesday on a prescribed route up Broadway on to Fifth Avenue and then over to Riverside Drive along the Hudson. They will be conspicuous because New York gave up double-decker buses 23 years ago but if some sharp-eyed or maybe soft-headed gent hadn't spotted a flaw in them only last Wednesday, they'd be even more conspicuous still because they'd have ploughed along, tangling with lamp-posts, telephone wires, hanging traffic lights and slicing off the heads of the upper-deck passengers every time they barged through a tunnel. To put it bluntly, the buses are 14 feet six inches high which is anything from two inches to two feet higher than many of the branches of the trees they're supposed to pass under on Riverside Drive, higher than very many of the traffic lights that are suspended over the avenues and altogether too high to go through any city tunnel without liquidating, at a blow, a $99,000 per vehicle. 

Now a year ago, one of the authority's transit engineers discovered this salient fact and told the chairman of the transit authority that he thought that they ought to replace the order with the same English firm's Continental model which is two feet shorter. The chairman ignored or rejected this advice and one of his men defended him this week by saying that if they'd ordered the Continental variation American passengers, at any rate, would have had to develop a permanent crouch to accommodate themselves to the low ceiling of the upper deck. 'They must have been designed,' he snorted, 'for midgets.' 

Well, the original order stood and the buses, designed for giants, have arrived and the transit authority looked at them and at all those tree branches and traffic lights and tunnels and defined the problem in a wonderfully bureaucratic way. 'It is', the authority said, 'a delicate issue.' It doesn't seem to have been a delicate issue to anybody on 19 August when the buses were proudly driven in file across the George Washington Bridge. Since then, the traffic department and the parks administration have been working in a quiet way to hang the traffic lights higher, to replace the wires and, I presume, to saw off the limbs of trees along the route that might possibly bob the passengers. This would all be very funny in a movie but no one dares to say what it's going to cost the city to carve a glide path, so to speak, for these earthbound buses which, in any case, can now go along only one route or, as another official put it, they're landlocked in Manhattan. If we were to send one of them to Brooklyn or Queens, a couple of other New York boroughs, it would go out as a double-decker and come back as a single-decker. 

The point for ordering the buses in the first place was, wouldn't you know, to save the city money. All that we'd heard about them was that they could be run at the same cost as New York's regular single-deckers but would carry 50 per cent more passengers. Well, nobody is publicising the combined costs of the workmen who are out re-jigging traffic lights and pruning trees, it has not yet been suggested that any tunnels should be rebuilt. This clanger comes along just when some interesting figures are to hand about the financial condition of New York City after its agonising moment of truth last year and the terrifying issue of whether the government of the United States should allow its largest city to go broke. These figures, by the way, are not shouted from the house tops. They have to be dug out and I don't imagine Mayor Beame would be grateful to any digger, but a fact is a fact, and it seems as if we must brace ourselves for another crisis once the elections are over and we stop praising the American dream and get down again to living the American reality. 

A year ago, the city's annual budget was $11.6 billion. As you recall, at that rate, the city couldn't honour its bonds, it couldn't get any more loans from New York State, couldn't even meet the minimum requirements of a debtor in desperate straits. So, you remember, the word went out, millions of words went out, to cut New York's services to the bone. Hundreds of policemen were fired, schools had their staff cut, some colleges closed, the city university abandoned once for all its brave tradition of a free university education for everybody. Day-care centres were shut or put on short funds, the number of firemen were dangerously reduced, and so on and so on. But, at first rebelliously, then grudgingly, the people began to see that these cruel cuts had to be made if the city was not to throw in the sponge as a going metropolis. 

So, in our moment of spendthrift euphoria we were budgeting $11.6 billions a year. Then the axe fell. The city fathers congratulated the people on their wisdom and endurance, the federal government helped out and the hullabaloo in Washington about Babylon-on-the-Hudson died down. We had all learned Mr Micawber's lesson about the difference between happiness and misery, the difference that is between annual income of twenty pounds against annual expenditure of nineteen, nineteen six and annual income of twenty pounds against annual expenditure of twenty pounds and sixpence. So we hear no more about it. 

We still hear no more but I bet the new Congress will, for it now appears that after all these cuts, after those prodigies of self-sacrifice, the city's annual budget is now at $12.5 billions or 9$00 millions more than in the days of our adversity. 

I offer these collateral stories by way of consolation to any Briton – European for that matter – who thinks of his own metropolitan government as heavy-handed or bureaucratic or otherwise inept. It’s been years, I think, since I remarked that as between the two countries, Britain is the luckier in that all the American preconceptions about her run in her favour whereas almost all the British preconceptions about America are to America's discredit. I well remember when my daughter first went to England and I found her, on the eve of her going, petrified with fright. I couldn't think why until she told me that she thought she would feel clumsy and naive. And you know why? Because, she said, she imagined that every house and flat in England, be it ever so humble, would be furnished in the most exquisite taste with nothing but Queen Anne lowboys, Hepplewhite work tables, Sheraton chests, and the like. Not so, I told her. 

On the other hand, I've tried to deal patiently down the years with enumerable Englishmen, some of them of high intelligence, who emerge from an American bathroom wondering where the drinking water is, just as if they're in the Brazilian jungle. Or assuming that American food began and ended with the hamburger, which in 99 public places in a hundred, even in this country, is a sadly deteriorated pancake of meal and cereal and meat and grain, and as for the bread, meal grain, poor meat and sawdust variation which passes for a hamburger in England, I simply groan and pass on. 

The hamburger, by the way, is a noble and simple dish. If it's made from top round, or better still, sirloin with the fat taken out, minced to a fine grain and made into a patty four inches wide and at least one and three-quarter inches thick and then with absolutely nothing added, is grilled in a hot oven – never fried – and so as to produce a brown, singed top and a pink, or glowing red, inside. 

What I'm saying is that whereas there are enumerable Americans who go to England and know and look out for the local delicacies from Dover sole to game pie, from Aylesbury duckling to Scottish baps it is, in my experience, extremely rare for even sophisticated Englishmen to come here and say I must have some striped bass or bluefish or Maryland crab cakes or Kentucky chess pie or Cape Cod oysters or blue points or succotash or a hundred other delectable items. They resolutely look through an American menu, choose an English meal and complain. 

Ah well! My main point is that because Europeans have an uncanny gift for importing the worst of America, America suffers in having the worst thought about it. On the other hand, England is known to Americans not by huge-circulation squalid scandal sheets masquerading as newspapers, not by any other bad thing but only by the courtesy of its people, the splendour of its National Trust mansions and by the greenness of its lush and rolling countryside, even in an historic drought, and this is the image that remains. 

But there is one British preconception about America which is in her favour. It is the myth of efficiency. Now I don't think you could go over my talks for the past 30 years with an ear surgeon's operating microscope and find any mention of the word. I have found Americans inventive, quick, often blundering and unique in applying intelligence to everyday living like knowing how to keep things moist or making ice at home or opening a tin or running a telephone service. But efficiency? It's not a noticeable characteristic and when the federal government takes over almost anything – welfare, for instance – millions of dollars are wasted and good people go short in the welter of inefficiency spiced with crookery. 

And when a city places an order for foreign buses, it orders them high enough to lynch the upper-deck passengers, which is where we came in.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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