On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 09:41:12PM +0000, Neil Williams wrote:

I missed one, incidentally , in the form of taxis. Taxis should not
be allowed to stop in bus lanes, IMO, as they cause both danger and
delay by doing so.

We've covered this before in this froup, and I disagree. I certainly
see no danger there, and the delay is vanishingly small compared to that
caused by delivery trucks parking in bus lanes or traffic turning across
bus lanes - and the latter won't go away with middle of the road bus
lanes, as people still need to turn right. Get rid of the delivery
trucks - or banish them to the dead of night - and the taxi "problem"
would be so small as to be not worth bothering about.

Remember, taxi drivers want to spend as little time as possible stopped.

Actually, it's not even delivery trucks that are the biggest problem.
It's security vans. AFAIK, while there is a sensible exemption from the
"no stopping in bus lanes" rule for people like the post office, there
isn't one for Securicor - and they can laugh off the occasional derisory
fine. As, obviously, can the operators of the same truck that I've seen
illegally parked in the same place every morning for several days in a
row, with a good dozen or so tickets on the windscreen every time.

This is again a benefit of centre-of-the-road bus
lanes - the taxis can delay the other traffic instead - but you could
also go for the option of providing lay-bys for taxis that move them
out of the way of the bus.

I see your point with middle of the road bus lanes, but making taxis
only stop in designated laybys (at least on some routes) would **** taxi
drivers and passengers off *a lot*, and also eat into the space
available for pavements that are already crowded.

When I use a taxi, I don't want to have to find the nearest taxi layby
and wait there until an available taxi just happens to go past, I want
to walk to the nearest place that I know lots of taxis drive past, hail
one, and jump in with the taxi stopping for maybe all of 20 seconds.
Unless you have literally thousands of those laybys all over central
London your plan will do an awful lot of damage to our very good and
useful taxi infrastructure. You'd need at least as many of them as
there are now bus stops, but spread more evenly.

--
David Cantrell | Minister for Arbitrary Justice

You know you're getting old when you fancy the
teenager's parent and ignore the teenager
-- Paul M in uknot