The words of one gruff Yorkshire politician said it all. 'You can call it whatever you like, it's still a bus to me,' he told me. There is always a problem in trying to excite the public with a new design or concept in bus travel. Some minor successes have registered with the public — low floors, huge curving glass fronts, radically different designs like the Solo. But the general mindset is that a bus is a bus. Introduce a vision of steel rails or overhead wires and excitement seems to come automatically, so how do you convince people that buses can also be sexy? There have been some notable European attempts at this. A Bombardier-inspired GTE — Guided Transit Express — vehicle toured the UK in the early 1990s to whip up interest and, more recently, the Civis has also been demonstrated. But with true Brit attention to the wallet first and the vehicle second, the near-tram prices quoted for these vehicles present the biggest obstacle to sales here. So those clever people at Wright's think they have the answer. Something almost as radical and 'different' as these exciting foreign beasts, but with solid, proven technology, manufacture and componentry and, best of all, a price that does not require the accountants to be tranquilised before it is spoken out loud.
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