David Cantrell wrote:


So don't stand on the stairs when the bus is moving. Or if you're so
unstable on your pins that you can't walk up and down stairs safely,
stay on the lower deck. There are seats reserved for the elderly and
infirm, and passengers generally give them up when needed.

a) the bus doesn't need to be moving, it's not like houses move much and
people fall down stairs in those every year
b) Paul's point earlier about crowding
c) in many cases you have to start descending the stairs before the bus
stops in order to get off. I often find myself descending the stairs
while the bus is braking for the stop, usually with a child in tow.
d) The recent fatality in Camden fell down the stairs while the bus was
stationary (and he was extremely drunk, as it happened). The one in
Dublin last year was while it was moving.

I therefore refute your argument.


Some other part of TfL is meant to keep them trimmed back, so it's
arguably not the bus's fault.

a) Paul's point earlier about TfL not running all roads by any means -
I've been on plenty of buses that routinely brush roadside trees and it
only takes someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time
b) the case I referred to
(http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Sky...20080641316580)
was a bus that lost control, striking a tree and dislodging a branch
onto a pedestrian. It's self-evident that a branch dislodged by a
double decker is going to have somewhat more kinetic energy than one
dislodged by a single decker.
c) the 'not the bus's fault' defence is *precisely* the argument I'm
using against the bendy jihadists, since they are locked into the habit
of using the shape of the bus as a proxy for all sorts of other tics,
prejudices and obsessions.

I therefore refute your argument.

getting topped under low bridges

Driver error. Are bendy drivers error-free? No, they're not, I've been
on one that whacked a bollard when going round a corner. The bus then,
of course, stopped, and stayed stopped for ages, blocking the traffic.

Nice to know you're more concerned about bollards than decapitation - I
hate to break it to you, but the human factor hasn't quite been
eliminated from the safety equation yet. I'll let you know when it is.

How common is that? I'd expect that people getting hurt because they
fall over in a bendy bus which doesn't have anything like enough seats
is orders of magnitude more common.

Not very, which is *precisely my point about the bendy jihad again*.
This happened in the Croydon tram/bus crash, where the fatality was
ejected from the upper floor through a window. That's one more fatality
than bendy/cyclist collisions have produced in eight years (and I'm not
aware of many falling-over-on-bendy deaths, either), yet cyclist safety
is *still* being trotted out by the bendy jihadists as well as the
bloody Mayor, and I've no doubt that if trams were being proposed some
twit would dig up some selective stats about tram collisions to support
their reactionary position. Ergo the jihad are, as ever, not actually
interested in transport safety or improving the city or even basic facts
and are merely repeating comforting prejudice and indulging in selective
quotation. What I want to know is why this ridiculous position has
somehow ended up vital to the future of London (I know *how*, but not
*why*).


Quite possibly. There's also a heck of a lot more double deckes than
bendies in service, so you'd expect that.

Irrelevant - my point is that *if you think it's OK to take a narrow,
selective, misleading statistical viewpoint you can't complain if I then
use one back at you*. I know my argument is ********, because I'm using
it as reductio ad absurdam to prove that *your* argument is ********.
The difference is that if we both accept both our arguments are
********, I'm left in the position of being willing to accept double
deckers and bendies as suitable vehicles for use on London bus routes,
while you have to change your opinion that bendies *aren't*.

In truth, buses, of any design, are an extremely safe form of transport
in London, which you have tacitly accepted, therefore the safety
argument against bendies is no longer tenable. QED.

Blocking traffic - you've just contradicted your own argument, mate.
Surely since bendies are a small fraction of 8000 buses which is a small
fraction of the total vehicles on the road they cannot be the cause of
congestion on anything like the scale that affects London daily. I
certainly don't see any reference to bendy removal in the 'Smoothing
Traffic Flow' documents from TfL and indeed the Mayor's Transport
Strategy forecasts an increase in congestion *even after everything
Boris does, including spending about £30-40m on the bendy jihad*.
That's the real scandal, so why aren't you protesting about that?

In any case the argument that it's somehow worse for a private motorist
to be held up by a bus than the other way round is the argumentum ad
Jeremy Clarkson and has no place in a civilised debate about city
transportation.

Tom