(20 Mar 2025, 9:22 am)xpm wrote An annoying feature of the citaros were the brakes - no two vehicles were the same in terms of effort and skill required to bring the bus to a comfortable stop, and with the ‘halt’ brake feature enabled as default this often led to jerky starts and stops,  it could be overridden by a switch in front of the park brake, which personally I preferred as it made for smoother driving, but it became a serious no-no at riverside with the switch security corded shut, and threats of disciplinaries for anyone disabling it.  The switch was also useful if you had a vehicle with bouncy closing doors where they reopen due to ‘too sensitive’ edges when preparing to pull away With the halt brake on you cannot pull away until they were fully closed, with the halt brake disabled you could pull away whilst they were closing, and in a majority of cases it stopped the doors from bouncing back open again.  For all there were many fans of the citaros I pretty much despised them, like driving a breeze block and nowhere near the manoeuvrability of a scania solar.

Mercs were very temperamental I found. Maybe too complicated for a service bus. I agree about the brakes and personally didn't like the design of the brake pedal (or pedals in general for that matter). I wasn't fussed on the location of the handbrake either. 

People slate Streetlites for heavy steering, but at slow speeds (reversing out of a bus station for example), steering a Citaro was like trying to manoeuvre a barge and very heavy.