On Mar 29, 6:25�pm, " wrote:
On 29 Mar, 17:03, Paul Terry wrote:





In message
,
" writes

Of course I understand the decision to terminate early was not the
driver's unilateral decision, but the decision not to issue individual
tickets was.

I've now found what I was looking for on the TfL website:

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/medi...tre/11105.aspx

"If a bus is curtailed short of its advertised destination and there are
passengers on board who wish to travel further, the driver should issue
a 'transfer ticket' to the driver of the next through bus."

That implies to me that the driver should have issued the ticket to the
next driver, not to a passenger.

It implies to me that the notion that each passenger should be
presented with "their own" individual transfer ticket is a complete
red herring. In some circumstances I can't see that it would be a
heinous crime for the driver to ask one of the passengers to oblige
him by passing the ticket on to the next driver on his behalf. I
suspect most people would have no problem in doing this. There could,
for example, be a horrendous gap in the service in the opposite
direction and plugging that at the earliest possible moment might be
felt to be a more productive use of the driver than remaining as a
kind of nanny or paper-pusher. Perhaps not the CORRECT procedure but
surely there should still be room for a modicum of common sense,
useful discretion by the driver and helpful co-operation between
driver and passengers? The insinuation without any apparant evidence
at all that the driver in the example given was necessarily a
beneficiery of the short-turning to facilitate fags/coffee and that it
was down to "laziness" on his part that all passengers were not issued
with individual transfer tickets seems to me to be unreasonable and
"shooting the messenger". With radio control, drivers destined to be
picking up transferred passengers will in most cases be notified of
this in advance so a sense of proportion should perhaps be brought to
bear in relation to the logistics of the same group of passengers
continuing their journey from the same location and time.
--
gordon- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Gordon,

The very fact that the driver did, in the end, wait 20 minutes for the
following bus rather gives the lie to the assertion that he was
expected to plug an immediate gap by turning immediately and going
back the other way. In any event, even if he had been meant to do
this, Lillie Road was a very odd place to be turned, since there is no
immediate place to turn: the bus would have had to go about 2 stops'
distance off route to meet the first place it could have turned
around.

I am in no way "shooting the messenger"! I did not object (as indeed
everyone else did) to the FACT that the bus was turning short: I was
merely suggesting that the correct procedure ought to be adopted. I
note with interest that the effect of the old London Transport rule (I
could not remember its precise wording) that it was a conductor's duty
to ensure that all passengers were safely transferred to a following
bus, has been maintained, as helpfully quoted by Paul Terry above.

Gordon, you talk about co-operation and commonsense, but you have not
answered the question I posed as to what would happen if I had boarded
another bus from all the other passengers and left them stranded
without the magic ticket. In order for me to be safe from an
inspector, the bus I boarded would have had to keep the ticket, and it
would have been absurd to expect me instead, having boarded the other
bus and explained to that driver what was happening, to then reclaim
the ticket from him and hand it on to one of the remaining
passengers.

I stand by my assertion that it was initially laziness on the part of
the driver in refusing to issue tickets to the other passengers: what
other possible reason could he have had for refusing to do so?

What is most worrying is that had it not been for me, all of the other
passengers would have simply boarded the next bus and paid another
fare. Why should they, when totally outside their control their
original journey is cut short? If I had not asked, the driver was
certainly not volunteering to print anything out at all. That's why I
think he was lazy.

Marc.