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Title: London Bus Crashes Are the Result of an Unsafe Model

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/19/0152...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this year I had one of those
encounters which, afterwards, I just couldn't stop thinking about. Eight
months and some digging later, I have decided to write about it. My meeting
was with an American businessman called Tom Kearney, who was on a pavement in
central London one Christmas when he was whacked on the head so hard that he
fell to the ground, spent weeks in a coma, and only just survived. Had he
been mugged? Not quite. He'd been hit by the giant wing mirror of a London
bus. [...] The most recent data show that 86 people died or were badly
injured in bus collisions in London between 10 December 2023 and 31 March
2024. Kearney's analysis of TfL data suggests that around three people a day
are hospitalised after bus safety incidents. That doesn't feel good, even
though it's tiny in comparison to the 1.8bn annual passenger journeys.
Compared with other world cities like New York and Paris the capital's buses
rank in the top quartile for financial efficiency but the bottom quartile for
collisions per kilometre. And the number of collisions in London has
increased in the past couple of years, despite buses travelling fewer miles.
Could this have anything to do with the way that bus contracts prioritise
speed? Last week, hundreds of bus drivers marched to TfL headquarters to
demand better working conditions and the right to report safety concerns
"without fear of retribution from TfL or employers." Drivers described the
pressure of long shifts, few breaks and having to drive in sometimes
blistering heat, all while being shouted at over a monitor by controllers who
want them to make up the time to the next stop, and keep the right amount of
distance between their bus and next. It's not surprising that a third of bus
drivers, before the pandemic, reported having had a "close call" from
fatigue. With the government about to export the London franchise model to
other parts of the country, someone in Whitehall needs to take a look.
Michael Liebreich, a former McKinsey consultant who sat on the TfL board for
six years, believes that TfL's contracting out model is "institutionally
unsafe." Bus drivers are under such pressure, he thinks, that some may break
the speed limit and overtake cyclists dangerously.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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