This morning's commute and other commuting stories

I think it's a bit of a stretch to assume that Chalfie's love must be confrontational.

Tough love

In my head she's quite senior civil servant on the edge of losing it.

Double-decker bus driver this morning decided to overtake me, no problem, he then decided to pull towards the curb diagonally whilst he was still pulling past me.. Not cool.

I knocked on his window at the bus stop to ask if he might think about not doing this as it's terrifying. He looks annoyed and told me whilst gesticulating that he gave me "loads of room".

If he'd seemed apologetic I'd have left it, as he was a dick about it I took photos of him and the bus and I've reported him to TFL.

I hope they make him sit in an all day road awareness course on his day off, wanker.

One day later I received a response to my TFL complaint, I'm pleasantly surprised to get a response at all, let alone so quickly, nice to see it's been taken seriously:

Dear Cazakstan,

Thanks for your online form yesterday about your near encounter with a bus on bus route 38, earlier that morning.

I’m very sorry that the driver pulled in towards the curb whilst you were cycling passed the bus. I can appreciate how frightening this must have been for you. I can also understand how upset you must have felt when the driver retaliated about you informing him of his actions. I’m concerned that the driver mentioned that he’d given you enough space, particularly as you felt so close to being squashed by the bus.

The safety of our customers and road users is our highest priority. We go to great lengths to train our bus drivers to very high standards. We work with organisations that represent cyclists, to develop specialist training. This makes bus drivers more aware of what it’s like to be a cyclist in London.

The reckless driving behaviour that you described is simply unacceptable. I’ve now made the bus operator Arriva London aware of your concerns. I’ve also passed on the photograph of the driver that you attached. The camera footage will be reviewed and the driver will be interviewed by his manager. Corrective measures will be taken to ensure such careless and poor behaviour isn't repeated.

Please note that the vehicle and cameras on the bus are owned by the Arriva London. To request CCTV footage about yourself, please contact Arriva London directly. I've provided their contact details below, along with your customer reference number:

Their details are:

Arriva London
203 Isledon Road
Finsbury Park
London
N7 7JR

Once again, I’m sorry for the distress that was caused. I hope you’re feeling better now that action is being taken. I’m glad to learn that most of the drivers that you’ve come across have been courteous. I wish you a much safer and more positive experiences whilst cycling along our buses in the future.

Thanks for contacting us. If there is anything else we can help you with, please reply to this email and I’ll be happy to help you. Alternatively, you can speak to one of our Customer Service Advisers.

Thats pretty positive, I would have thought they would take ages to reply if at all! I guess there must be some pressure on them after the amount of people getting knocked off etc..

I'd assume that all of the London bus operators have personnel and policies in place for this nowadays. Dealing with it like this is much easier than some twitter shitstorm and, just on an economic basis, they don't want drivers who may cause an accident that they're liable for.

I don't mean to piss on this response but they have essentially done nothing.
They can send out this very positive response knowing there will never be a come back. If Arriva do something about it, TFL look great. If Arriva do nothing, TFL don't look bad because they 'tried' and blame Arriva. It's like the DfT saying it's not their fault the trains are a bag of shit.
I know this is very sceptical and pessimistic of me.
I had exactly the same response but subsequently heard nothing. Back then It wasn't common knowledge you could ask for CCTV so it was never mentioned in their response. Perhaps now with CCTV being common knowledge it will force more transparency.
Next time I feel the need to complain about a bus driver I'm just going to go straight to the operator.

I too had the same response and then nothing ever happened.

I'm not expecting the driver to get fired but even if it makes him stop for a second to think about how he acted then I achieved my goal.

I requested the CCTV footage from Arriva, I bet they don't reply as quickly!

Yeah, you would hope that there is a three strike policy or something similar within the operator. But right now we'll never know what the outcome is.
In my incident the driver deliberately drove me onto the pavement going round a corner. He hadn't indicated so I assumed (wrongly) he'd be going straight on. During a heated exchange, where he'd actually got out of the bus, he told me he saw me and did it deliberately, essentially because he disliked people on bikes filtering on the left.

tl;dr - I wanted this guy fired, he literally endangered my life.

I requested the CCTV footage from Arriva, I bet they don't reply as quickly!

Under GDPR regs they have a month to respond.

Under GDPR regs they have a month to respond.

Good to know, ta!

@Tomo187 tl;dr - I wanted this guy fired, he literally endangered my life.

This sounds much scarier than my encounter, it's scary that people in charge of such gigantic vehicles can have such disregard for others' safety.

That feels like a police matter, if he's admitting to trying to kill or injure you on purpose. Fuck me, it's actually terrifying the kinds of nut jobs who are in charge of vehicles, if you think about it too much...

Anecdotally, and completely unscientifically, based on observation of LCC mailing lists over more than ten years as well as this forum, it's mainly an issue of bus driver training and pay. Complaints about bad driving by bus drivers always ran high in the late 90s and decreased significantly (it really was noticeable) when Livingstone put more money into training and raised wages. When that went down again under Boris Johnson, complaints went up again (again very noticeable).

It obviously shouldn't be a training or pay issue whether bus driving endangers other road users, but it's always seemed to me, based on tracking it as above, that there's a correlation. Disclaimer: That may be completely wrong and should obviously be examined properly. Needless to say, it's not an excuse if true.

From what I remember, some bus companies in London pay more than others. Is there any correlation there?

(From 2015)

https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2015/02/05/09/Bus-driver-map.png?w968

Ooof.. £9.30/hr..

Perfectly possible, but I have no idea.

Oof good or oof bad?

They all get paid more than I do at the moment 😅

To be honest it wasn't scary as I'm confident enough to get on the curb but many people are not and it would have terrified them and maybe even turned them away from riding.

oof bad

It below the London living wage, so probably bad

This.

Just cycled up brixton hill and the works going on have fucked everything. Really not nice to ride more so than normal and somehow managed to make the part after the roadworks worse too as drivers speed to make up lost time.

Fuck that I'm riding via Balham next time/10

Met a guy with a Cannondale who shouted at me "Nice bike!!" (I cycle an old f1000 caad4)

Ended up chatting and he's quite a fan, got a leftie and a team replica f400. And two not working headshock forks, I offered him a lend of my headshok tool and help but no joy.

Like our parents say: Don't accept bike tools from strangers ;)

Like so:

So, this evening the engineers (for that is how the warning sign identified them) are working on a solution.
What they've done is they've dug a hole, ~75mm deep.
Into this hole, they've rawl-bolted the flange, so that the top of the flange is level with terra -firma.
They've then attached the pipe work, and buried the flange under ~75mm of asphalt.
So plan B differs from plan A by adding ~75mm of asphalt on top of the flange.
I'm not convinced that they are actually engineers, or that their solution will be in any way effective - given the ~1200mm of leverage afforded by the pipe work.

A genuine email at my workplace. Ugh.

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