please empty your brain below
I enjoyed the Bob Stanley article. Is anyone collecting together his London articles?
She said that many wheelchair users don't feel that they either want to, or are safe to, use the lifts on the buses. Ties in with what I mentioned last week about bus drivers pulling off, accelerating and decelerating and braking less smoothly than they could do - hard for people with no additional mobility needs, impossible for people who already have balance etc issues.
Her view was that some sort of system of specially adapted taxis that could be summonsed to specific points by mobile phone by registered disbled people would have met everyone's needs more cheaply and more effectively.
And, I'm amazed at how much the price of old Routemasters has gone up in the last 6 months...
What an odd bunch, this is the erractic, smelly, noisy red things that I avoid at all costs, yes?
but I was out of town, and I have to live with the fact that I have to make at least one haritage journey eac week to calm down...Really enjoyed the 159 posting below, most evocative.
Our thoughts are with you at this difficult time, DG.
The driver of a following bus was in tears as she drove passed the bus garage. The man in funny spectacles continued to wave his "The end is nigh" placard, and the shiny new buses bunched up as all buses do, heading of towards Marble Arch in a group of 3.
I guess that's what we call progress.
Have a good trip, DG.
(I see you've got a little icon thingie for the address bar - very nice, I'm a fan of them myself)
Thank you London for saying Good Bye with Style
THANK YOU NOT Mr Livingstone
The Routemasters were quaint, but it's time to move on, and if you want to live in a muesum piece of a city, live in Paris, London has always evolved and channged.
Not convinced its a reason enough to be rid of the Routemasters though. I love Paris too, not sure it's really fair to describe it as a "museum piece of a city" at all. Rome, though, that might be, and might have good reason to to be so...
London could have had a 100\\% accessible bus network without having 100\\% accessible buses. Route 159 was perfectly accessible yesterday morning, for example, just so long as you took a number 3 and/or a number 109 bus instead.
Over the last few decades Transport for London have completely missed the opportunity to develop a new bus which was both accessible and had character, and I think that's the greatest loss here.
It's not about segregation in any way (or, as you put it, thinking that: "disable passengers should be kept away on a small service away from the general public", it's about applying some common sense, and thinking about whether there are more creative ways of organising things that meet everyone's needs in the best way.
If I were a wheelchair user, I'd much rather have a free taxi service that could meet my particular needs than have to cope with a bus service where I relied on the goodwill of others people to assist me in accessing the accessible buses.
I've seen one (and only one) wheelchair user get onto one of the new buses, outside Liverpool Street Station - he looked like a Para Olympic athlete, and was clearly very fit - and he really struggled to pull himself onto the bus, and the bus driver didn't wait until he had 'parked' before setting off at great speed, causing people to have to jump out of his way, and try to hold on to him while he got the brake on. Really dangerous, and he was clearly quite shocked.
I've seen plenty of people use the ramps on the newer buses, and with a lot of ease, so I don't see what the issue is?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as a famous Londoner once wrote.
It is most unfortunate that their bullying has gained them friends in local government in London (AFAIK by law there is no requirement for "all-accessible" buses before 2017, but Ken decided to waste immeasureable amounts of taxpayers' money by jumping the gun by 11 years) and evidently in the national government too.
and as for "keeping sections of the communities apart": I think it's great if everyone could travel together - but common sense and pragmatism is surely preferable to the imposition of some kind of ideological (and hence bullying) vision, which may or may not be appropriate to actual circumstances in which both various categories of both disabled people and the general public find themselves in.
But it's nonsense and simplistic to say that RMs are not accesible. Frankly it could be argued they are MORE accessible in certain ways than most of the modern buses: owing largely to the absence of conductors, the top decks of routes through some dodgy neighbourhoods are not always the most welcoming of places for many hours of the day.
The RMs also have more seats than many of the new buses - if you wanted to take the politically loaded term "accesibility" to take this matter to task it would be possible to do so.
I'm not an expert in the matter, but I've also been led to believe that compliance with "disability discrimination legislation" has resulted in the new blind displays of buses in London - so that e.g. instead of route 13 blinds reading "Finchley Road, Baker Street, Oxford Street, Piccadilly Circus, Strand: ALDWYCH", the new ones simply give the final destination. This is ridiculous and useless - and if anything undermines the ability of people to use public transport, if the route is not made immediately clear int he way that the old blinds did. I fail to see how any reasonable person could conclude that providing comprehensive information, which was long provided in London, is "discriminatory".
Anyway I'm all in favour of open access and integration and so on, bu I'm opposed to the petty politicing that leads to the destruction and vandalism of beautiful and good design by interfering busybodies.
In my city (flyover USA, no natural boundaries so lots of sprawl and relatively low population density), the (underfunded) transit system runs a special-needs service much as BW describes. While it's generally krep compared to a taxi, the whole system is generally krep compared to driving yourself (as I said, underfunded). But the disabled get door-to-door service (even off the regular routes), which is far better than what the average bus passenger gets. At least in this case, "ideological visions" didn't get mixed with the practical goal of better transport for the disabled.
(But it's implementing those ideological visions-- especially if the general public gets inconvenienced-- that makes the do-gooders feel good, doesn't it?)
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