Crayolas, set squares and glue-on sparkles to the ready: a competition has just been launched to design the next generation of Routemaster buses. Voters will of course recall that the much-loved bus was a key plank of Boris Johnson's manifesto, as he tempted bendy-bus loathers by claiming the articulated eyesores would be banished from our streets in favour of a new fleet of Routemasters. Yet during his first two months in office the topic......

A few weeks back a group of Flickr folk, led by Annie Mole and supported by Trusted Places and the lovelies at Flickr themselves, were given free tickets to run amok in the London Transport Museum with their cameras. The Museum reopened in November last year following a major revamp and what better PR could the place wish for than a load of London photographers taking nearly 700 snapshots, posting them on Flickr and gushing......

As a parochial and unglamorous antidote to the Hollywood Oscars that took place last weekend, London Underground was crowned Public Transport Operator of the Year at what LUL are desperately trying to sex up as the "transport Oscars" but are actually more prosaically known as the London Transport Awards. The MD of LUL explained they had scooped the gong for: delivering a record volume of service, carrying more passengers than ever before, while at......

Dusting off the snow from last year, every day this month the Londonist team will be pointing you in the direction of a Christmas present that (with a bit of luck) you won't already have on your list. Climb up onto our collective lap and we'll see what we can move from our sack to your stockings.. There's an big market for anything involving the London Underground system when it comes to buying gifts,......

To celebrate the rebranding of the Platform for Art initiative as Art on the Underground, TfL are giving away specially commissioned posters at 5 Zone 1 tube stations all next week (bound to be a bunfight on Monday though, be prepared). Among the artists is Turner Prize nominated Mark Titchner and poster designs include a fictitious A-Z map and some snow capped mountains. 25,000 of each design have been produced and will be stacked......

Toot toot! And honk, honk! For the London Transport Museum has finally reopened after two years and £22 million of renovation. Hot on the (w)heels of St Pancras. Typical: you wait years for a major nexus of transport heritage to open, and then two come along at once. The Covent Garden attraction tells the story of the trotting, crawling and whizzing of our city over the past 200 years. There’s also a section looking......

For my first post to the Londonist I had several interesting digital maps, too many in fact to fit in, so here are a few I had left over. First up it's a city guide, nothing that new but moodmapper.com tries to create a USP by using your moods. Click on the coloured grid to show your feelings and let the site do the rest, an interesting idea. London Transport has a problem with......

Yee-hah! Woo-hoo! Yippy-kayay! And other such celebratory noises. After umpteen years (actually 20 or so) and countless debates and immeasurable lengths of newspaper footage, Crossrail has today been given the funding green light. Londonist can only join the chorus of approval on this. To quote the Man in Seat 61: Like the RER in Paris, this will bring suburban trains right through the centre of the city and out the other side, relieving the Underground......

If you haven't had chance to yet, get down to Free Range this week to see what's happening. Joe Waller, a Camberwell graphic design student is one of the artists you can see exhibiting there. Tell us more about you and your artwork. I grew up in the West End of London so my environment has always stimulated my work. Much of my current artistic inspiration comes from my past writing graffiti and walking......

It seems we're writing more and more about London Transport these days. Now it's the turn of the London Assembly to have their say: they want to make buses safer. Isn't that nice of them? So they're asking you, British public and residents of London how to make it crime free and a happy travel experience. Some would call this forward thinking. Others might say it was passing the buck. So, the crime free......

Yesterday we let you know about badoyster, a company making satirical oyster card wallets. This got us thinking, why haven't more people got cool oyster wallets? An oyster card is something that most of us carry but most of us still use a battered Tfl one with all the colour coming off. Well, it seems badoyster aren't your only way out of oyster wallet boredom. Oyster card wallets might just be the fashion accessory......

The London Transport Museum has gone eBay crazy this month: This fundraising auction is being held by the Friends of London’s Transport Museum to raise money for the redevelopment of the popular central London museum. All proceeds will go towards new exhibitions and education facilities which will be enjoyed by hundreds of thousands people and schools in the years to come. Please help us to realise this important project. So what are they are......

When Oyster cards were first introduced there was an initial, not unsurprising, concern over privacy issues. Some people just didn't want their every movement logged by London Transport, even if it meant slightly cheaper journeys. In recent days however those fears have taken on a slightly different twist, with private detectives and lawyers beginning to report that suspicious husbands and wives are accessing the information to track their partner's whereabouts. The Independent recently called......

BBC4 are giving the beloved Routemaster a sendoff with a night of dedicated double decker telly: On Friday 9 December, the most famous bus in the world - the Routemaster - will take its final journey through the streets of London. BBC Four and Arena celebrate the transport icon. The day after the last Routemaster has buckarooed its final passenger from its suicide step you can sit back in your London Transport Museum PJs......

A week or so ago we began asking for Londonist readers to start sending in their 'opinion pieces' to us for publication over the weekend. Really what we wanted were your rants and your moans about London life, the stuff that you really needed to vent. Now somewhat unsurprisingly a few of the emails we received were about London's somewhat notorious transport system, so we thought we'd post two of those emails here today.......

Bob Kiley is to step down as London Transport Chief in January 2006. Epolitix.com has all the goss'. Angela Merkel arrived in London yesterday to play 'middle woman' between us and France over the EU budget. Cristiano Ronaldo will not face charges over the alleged rape in the Sanderson hotel in October. Patrick Stewart just can't stay out the news. Now he's gone and lost the only script for A Christmas Carol, due to......

Earlier this week the BBC printed this piece of writing by Geoff Ryman. Ryman is the author of 253, a fantastic piece of fiction about the relationship between all the passengers on a single tube train. The article on the BBC encapsulated Ryman's views on the bombings of 7 July and offered some thoughtful and intelligent insights into the aftermath of the events. After reading the article, Londonist contributors decided to draw up a......

In design terms, the Tube is best known for its iconic map, designed by Harry Beck. But an equally noteworthy part of the Underground "look" is its typography, designed in 1916 by Edward Johnston. (Although that date might not be right; the LT Museum says 1913 for some reason.) Just as the map was a confusing tangle before Beck got his hands on it, the Tube's signage was a mess. As different lines had......

The BBC reports that London Underground has placed vintage posters around the tube network to announce the arrival of Spring. The posters were selected form the archive of the London Transport Museum and were originally produced to "encourage Londoners to use the Tube as one of the "quickest and most reliable ways to see more of their city". Alright, so TfL might have a bit of a problem communicating that particular philosophy these days,......

With all the predictability and regularity that they've never quite managed to achieve with their trains, London Underground staff have "averted" their New Year's Eve strike by reaching a last-minute pay deal with London Transport managers. RMT general secretary Bob Vrow lived up to his name, saying "this is a fantastic deal which puts our members at the top of the industrial pay league in Britain." In slighly less happy news, the Piccadilly line......