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Old April 18th 20, 06:40 AM posted to uk.transport.london
Martin Smith[_6_] Martin Smith[_6_] is offline
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First recorded activity at LondonBanter: Apr 2020
Posts: 2
Default Free travel on London busses

On 17/04/2020 23:06, Lew 1 wrote:
MissRiaElaine wrote:
On 17/04/2020 22:23, Lew 1 wrote:

Edinburgh was introducing them when I was there last Summer, along with
on-board videos very carefully (and ludicrously for someone used to London)
explaining and demonstrating how to board the bus using the front, and how
to leave the bus using the middle.

However, even with double doors, they still perform the peculiar Edinburgh
ritual of letting people off before the stop, but refusing to let people on
until the bus in front has left and the driver can pull up to the stand
proper. This does rather reduce the benefit of having double doors.


It's not specific to Edinburgh, we were certainly told not to let people
on (or off, for that matter) away from stops when I started driving in
Birmingham in 1998.

Something to do with insurance cover they said, whether it was bs or not
I don't know, anyway a lot of drivers still did it, although I never did
if I could avoid it.


But this isn’t away from stops, it’s specifically at stops. The driver will
pull up behind a bus already at the stop and open the doors to let people
off, then shut the doors and wait until the bus (or two, or three!) in
front have moved off before pulling forward to the stand to let the queue
of people on.

It just seems to be a rule that each stand can have no more than one bus
loading at any time, but the same limit doesn’t apply to offloading. The
way it slows down a bus’ progress is maddening if you’re behind a busy
route and you constantly have to wait for everyone on the bus in front to
get on and pay and sit down before your driver will pull forward to find
no-one to let on at all. Cue the same at every. Single. Stop.

Lew


not like that here in south london, one of our local stops which is an
interchange between 7 routes has road markings going back far enough for
4 buses and there are times when people are boarding 4 different buses
at the same time, its somewhat complicated by the fact that 2 of the
routes sometimes change driver there as well which causes extra delays

--
Martin