Article
Purring Green Buses
Giles Woodforde
29 January 2025
Have you noticed that all the buses running on city routes are now painted the same shade of green,
with touches of blue and black?
Green All-Electric Bus
Ever since I was taken to visit the Cowley Road bus garage as a small boy I have been fascinated by bus liveries.
I fell in love that day with the deep red and brown (separated by horizontal olive bands) colour scheme that
for decades adorned Oxford’s buses: it has never been bettered, and is still to be glimpsed on old episodes
of Morse from time to time.
In later decades, all manner of paint jobs have been applied to local buses — remember the "Big Blue 2s",
and the alien yellow double-deckers that appeared on Kidlington’s streets during Covid?
But that’s past history. With only slight variations, the same green colour scheme is now used by both Oxford Bus and Stagecoach —
a requirement of the County Council who put £6M into a £82.5M project (the considerable balance comes from the Government
and the two bus companies themselves) to completely replace all buses running Oxford SmartZone services
with brand-new, electrically powered vehicles.
Kidlington has been both first and last to see these green machines purring about. Oxford Bus put some of their
first 104 new electrics into service on the 700 Kidlington to Thornhill Park and Ride route last spring.
For Stagecoach, who run the 2/2A service, it’s been a rockier road. First, there were lengthy delays in getting
enough power installed to charge their 55 new buses, then there have been some "technical issues".
Green All-Electric Bus
But now the green transformation is nearly complete. The air we breathe will be just that bit cleaner, and there's an
added benefit: an appropriately purring loudspeaker voice is on hand to tell us when our bus stop is approaching.
No bad thing on these dark winter evenings.
Author
Giles Woodforde is a long-time resident of Kidlington village and was once a familiar voice to listeners of BBC Radio Oxford. He is best known as a feature writer and reviewer for the Performing Arts for The Oxford Times newspaper.
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