London Banter - View Single Post

Someone Somewhere · January 3rd 17, 03:11 PM posted to uk.transport.london

On 03/01/2017 15:31, d wrote:
On Tue, 03 Jan 2017 07:18:22 -0600
wrote:
In article , d () wrote:

It does seem to be history repeating itself. Boris didn't like the
bendies
giving some spurious nonsense about them being a danger to cyclists
(or more likely because they were Kens idea) and now Kahn has decided
the roastmasters are a poor choice. Which to be fair, they are.

Speaking as a cyclist I hated the bendies. They were so long they were very
hard to navigate round and they kept cutting in on one.

So treat them like an HGV. Problem solved. They have them all over europe
without thousands of dead cyclists littering the roads. As someone who has
taken a pushchair on a double decker on number of occasions its a fecking
nightmare - half the bus is out of bounds. God knows what the disabled think of
the bloody things. Quite why we're so wedded to having 2 storey vehicles in
this country is anyones guess.

Wasn't the problem more (from my experience) that the road design in
London is unsuited to large numbers of such long vehicles - ie the
distance between traffic lights and other obstacles to road progress was
not a reasonable multiple of bendies long so if (when!) the service
bunched up or many routes served a road then they caused more congestion
than would reasonably be expected or presented an impediment to progress
- whether that be themselves, other motorists or pedestrians.

That, allied to their reputation as a "free bus" and the consequential
crush loading on certain services (25 anyone?), was what made them
undesirable than the supposed risk to cyclists (which was unproven) and
their flammability (which was fixed and never caused an injury anyway).