Motorcycles in your bus lane

The problem I have with this version of events is that a) it comes from a professional cycling lobbyist, and b) it is the first I have heard of it.
It's wonderful the things you can learn reading lfgss. I wonder if anyone else is still following this.
If it happened this way, where were the rebuttals to Kevin Ash's highly biased Telegraph piece at the time? If the motorcycle lobby were the ones reworking the data, how come the reworked data skewed the results away from the version which showed the most benefit to motorcycles, pedestrians and bicycles?
There were plenty of rebuttals of the Telegraph article, in the cycling press and blogs. I don't think that the motorcycle lobby re-worked the data. They just demanded that it be done. The re-worked data (2008) claimed a benefit to motorcyclists and some other road users. The original analysis of the same data showed no results because there was not enough data.
Who are these top statisticians in the country, for example? What are their names and how did they become so highly-regarded? Were they previously employed by the LCC or the CTC?
These were the top officials at Transport for London at the time, one was head of the London Road Safety Unit at Transport for London, the other was the head statistician at that time. They signed the collision report prepared in 2007 and approved the official report into the 2002-6 trial published in 2008.

If the actual results were inconclusive and showed no statistically significant results either way, then what possible reason could there be for the LCC to oppose the introduction of Motorcycles into bus lanes? Surely only sound evidence of a deleterious effect could justify continued prohibition.
What we questioned in 2002 was the claim that there was a safety benefit from allowing motorcycles in bus lanes. We opposed setting up trials which were too small to produce enough data to demonstrate any benefit or disbenefit. We opposed the conceit of doing a trial with insignificant data and then claiming that no data = no problem.

Do you have independent (i.e. non cycling lobby) sources to back any of this up?
Did Boris, undoubtedly clever though he is, really take only one day to read all the data and completely change his mind about the previous results? Because as I recall, the manifesto pledge was always to introduce another trial and was always couched in terms of "if the data is indeed correct".
What's an independent source? Most of this is in the public domain if you look hard enough. Boris's manifesto pledge was to allow motorcycles in bus lanes, without doing another trial. To be honest it probably took him more than one day that to see that he could not do it within the rules of the Road Traffic Regulation Act without reliable data to justify the change. We met his advisors about two weeks after the election, it might be possible that they had not thought of doing another trial until we asked them about it. The first comment I heard directly from Boris after the election was at a press event in early June. He said that there was not enough evidence to say there was a danger or there wasn't a danger - which is what we said to the GLA transport committee several years earlier.
As a demonstration of why statistics cannot be the final word on all this, I could come up with a study, statistically valid, to show that by removing bicycles from bus lanes you can dramatically reduce cycle casualties. All I would have to do would be to compare the M4 bus lane with a similar distance of central London bus lanes
Nice try. Actually I supported the M4 bus lanes, with motorcycles. It reduced collisions and probably decreased journey times for most users. Since they removed it the DfT have not released all the data on their traffic analysis for the effect on bus and taxi passengers, and motorcyclists. Of course an offside fast lane on a motorway is very different from a nearside bus lane on a road with many pedestrians and cyclists.