Safe Speed Forums

i was driving to wimbledon and as i got near the village this bus wanted to get out the bus stop, started indicating right, but becuase i was near him or there was no point of me letting him out because i was so close i decided that he can wait, but NO he pulled out while i was overtaking him and not only taht he was at the set of traffic lights and there red so i was in the middle of the road (well on the other side of the road) as soon as the lights changed he was delaying it so when they went amber he wud go and i wouldnt but luckily i went when it was green, he was infront at this time and then he played this stupid game going really slowly very slowly up the hill which held me and louds of traffic behind me up

i do admit i was pissed of at him so i stuck my middle finger up only when i could see him argue at me and then he shouted verball out the window, also when he was getting off the lights he tried to scare me by trying to creep up slowly on my nearside

and btw im not like this im a very pleasant person who normally lets buses out no problem but this time he was out of order

I have had several issues with bus driving. Only this week I was overtaking a stationary bus. It then indicated and pulled out (simultaneously) when I was just passing his rear quarter. The upshot is that I was boxed out on the wrong side of the road with bollards in the middle of the road blocking my path. The bus driver either didn't look or just pulled out for the hell of it.

A friend of mine has metal plates in his pelvis where a bus driver pulled out from a side road right in front of him causing him to swerve into the oncoming traffic on his motorbike. The bus driver didn't stop.

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Speed camera policy Kills

Just remember that a bus driver is no different to any other kind of driver, there are good (like my wife, not that I'm biased ), bad (like the prats mentioned above who give all the others a bad name), and the plain and simple average. And like HGV drivers like to say whenever one of their colleagues gets criticised, until you've seen life from the driving seat of a bus you might not realise just how utterly shit the rear visibility is. Most buses have side mirrors smaller than those fitted to the average white van, and the design of some bus cabs means that the driver ends up with part of the cab framework cutting right across that part of the side window they need to look through in order to see the crappy side mirror anyway...

So yes, there are some dangerous drivers out there who just happen to be sat behind the wheel of a bus rather than a car/bike/etc, but let's not forget that for every bad bit of bus driving you remember, you've probably witnessed and completely forgotten about 100 times as many bits of perfectly decent driving.

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Chris

True that there's good and bad, but bad bus/hgv driving is worsened by the size of the damn things.

I do think the standard of bus driving is getting markedly worse though, at least in this neck of the woods. As for indicators- they mean nothing- they'll pull out without indicating and start indicating to move away when there's 20 people yet to board the bus. A peculiar tendancy I've found is if you attempt to pass a bus as he's indicating he'll often "stamp on it" regardless, yet if you pause and flash him he'll usually wait untill you come to a complete halt then slowly move away.

Annoys me that I can be done for not wearing a seatbelt in my car, yet the powers that be are quite happy for me to stand in a bus driven by a failed WRC aspirant. (try a london nightbus at 3am, swerving round corners way too fast, ignoring red lights, bouncing over kerbs, it's quite a rush when you're too drunk to know or care better, I'm just amazed they get away with it and don't crash more often)

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Fear is a weapon of mass distraction

IMHO the worst thing they did was put the "Please let buses pull out" signs on them. That was the beginning of the rot.

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Prepare to be Judged

There are some bus builders who do not design a bus properly. They merely take a standard lorry chassis and dump an ill-designed bus body on it.

This means the controls are often in the wrong place, the poor driver has problems seeing in front, let alone behind him!

There was a particular design where if the bus driver needed to look to the left before pulling out, he would have to open the doors.

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www.thatsnews.org.uk / www.thatsnews.blogspot.com / http://thatsmotoring.blogspot.com/

ABSOLUTELY. The essential principle of 'equal rights for all road users; priority is determined only by location' was dangerously eroded at that point. And it's got worse since then.

We now have bus drivers who think they are more important than other road users - and who can blame them, the authorities appear to say so.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Just out of interest, in the Netherlands a bus indicating to pull out has right of way over traffic approaching from behind.

Works great. The buses do not tend to just indicate and pull out willy-nilly, so you are generally (always in my experience) given adequate chance to slow down, and because other road users tend to respect this convention they are already extra wary when approaching a pulled-over bus.

At busy times this means that the bus does not have to fight to get out, so the flow of public transport is assisted.

Perhaps an idea worth implementing in the UK?

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p.s. I am still absolutely floored by Paul's death. May 2008 be the greatest ever for SafeSpeed. His spirit lives on.

Theroetically it already is over here and in the HC, but it's seen as a good think over there and a bad thing over here. After all it delays the motorist by an entire 15 seconds and helps to keep public transport on time. Both bad bad bad bad.

I kind of agree with this, in that other road users shouldn't need reminding about basic courtesy, and as Paul suggests it does give some bus drivers a licence to take the piss.

But in a society where good manners and a willingness to let the other person go first seem to be increasingly rare traits exhibited by drivers, buses will find it increasingly difficult to rejoin the main carriageway from a recessed stop, service timings will suffer, passengers will complain, the operator will risk penalties for late running, and eventually they'll demand the local authority replaces all the recessed stops with ones flush to the carriageway edge...

...and once that happens, it won't just be the odd vehicle here or there that gets held up as the bus pulls out of the stop, it'll be every vehicle behind the bus for however long the bus is at the stop (unless the oncoming traffic flow is sufficiently light to allow them to overtake the bus).

This isn't just idle speculation, it's already happening in London.

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Chris

And start re-engineering bus stops so you can't get past, by filling in the laybys and putting traffic islands alongside. Pure dog-in-the-manger stuff which is bound to create a them-and-us mentality between bus drivers and everyone else.

The difference is that in the Netherlands the bus is not relying on the goodwill of the approaching traffic to let it out. The bus gets right of way when it indicates to pull out.

As I said, it works fine, no-one here seems to have any problems with this.
I suppose that a side benefit of this setup is that "wary drivers approaching a stopped bus" are less likeliy to be surprised by a pedestrian stepping out from in front of the bus.

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p.s. I am still absolutely floored by Paul's death. May 2008 be the greatest ever for SafeSpeed. His spirit lives on.

I've noticed locally that even with bus lanes the bus drivers use the car lanes. After much thought I realised why.....to get across to the other bus lane at the traffic lights they have to cross the other lanes, and nobody gives way for them so they stay stuck in the bus lane and cannot get out of it.

I have noticed that bus drivers seem to think they are more important than everyone else.
I'm not going to let them pull out and get stuck behind them, nor am I going to make any effort to let them get out of, or in to, their sacred bus only lanes.

They are always driven slower and needed unless they are going home then they actually go quickly. And honk at the drunk people crossing the road at 2:00am rather than attempt to not run them over.

I saw one bus driver have a brief look the right before pulling out, then he started pulling out and looked down to continue fiddling with his mobile phone. On Ashley Road in Poole. Which is very busy.

While they have their bus only lanes and sighs saying "I am more important than you" they don't need me to be helpful.

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Andrew.

Pulling out from a 'minor' (i.e. non-priority) position depends on a gap in the traffic.

If there's no gap in the traffic I have to wait. If someone lets me out, that's brilliant - a courtesy.

If you give 'certain vehicle types' priority like this two things go seriously wrong:

- priority becomes ill defined. Is the bus intending to pull out? Do I have to give way to a coach? A mini-bus? An empty bus? A privately owned bus? Does priority change when the bus's indicator comes on? What if I'm 'right on top of' the bus when the indicator comes on and I can't stop? If I now hit the indicating bus is it my fault?

- Animosity, competition, 'us and them' attitudes and self-important behaviour are all promoted. We don't want any road user class to have reason to believe that they are unequal.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

They wouldn't need to make requests of people to let buses pull out, if the adult population of this country started acting like adults rather than children in adult sized clothing.



How then does this observation square with your belief that the ill-defined rules regarding hatched areas with broken edging allows some road users to make progress by using them, whilst others believe it is illegal to do so and stay out of them?

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Political Correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical, liberal minority and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

The highway code states other road users should give way to the bus, however it doesn't state that buses have priority over other road users. Unfortunately, a large minority of bus drivers seem to have interpreted this as the case; that they have priority - this is quite clearly dangerous.

Perhaps if we treated them like adults in the first place?



There's no conflict. No inequality. But there are differing levels of understanding, which is not only to be expected - it's a racing certainty.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Would you behave the same way towards any other group of road users?



Buses should be driven as quickly or slowly as necessary in order to maintain the timetable - down in this part of the world there are plenty of routes where, if the bus has to stop at more than 1 stop in 3 or 4, it's then impossible for the driver to stick to the timetable whilst also sticking to the speed limits... And if the bus company has set the same timings for their early morning/late evening runs as for the rush-hour runs on the same route, you might then find the bus has to run slowly between stops, or sit at a stop for several minutes, because otherwise they'd end up too early at the next timing point.

Things might be a bit more laid back and unregulated down in Poole, but in and around London, early or late running is a BIG no-no - the bus operators will be penalised if it happens too often, which then filters down to the drivers involved being disciplined.

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Chris

I can't accept it as reasonable to slow traffic (i.e the traffic behind the bus) for the sake of a bus timetable. If the bus is ahead of schedule it must wait at a bus stop for time to catch up. Easy.

If a bus is behind schedule, I suppose that it should be driven as fast as safely and comfortably possible. But then if it isn't behind schedule, probably it should still be driven as fast as safely and comfortably possible. So that looks like a complete red herring to me.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety