Thanks to the Press

The press just loves the bus industry. We supply it with so much ‘news’.

Allegedly ‘throwing’ a young couple off a bus is bad enough but when one of them is an eight-month pregnant 17-year-old named Kayleigh, you can imagine the mischief the press might make. And this is what the Echo did, following Wednesday’s story on Wilts & Dorset’s m6 at that modern-day urban desert, that ‘galaxy of fun’, known as Tower Park entertainmaent park near Poole.

It was just another example of rather than sorting the matter out at source, the public heading straight for the press. Is it such a symptom of our compo culture that every “no” or refusal seems to end up in the paper? Increasingly, people who don’t get their own way appear in the local rag these days, and it’s happening to shops, the police, the council, any service in fact. It saddens me but it no longer surprises me. Is it a sign of desperation as the circulation of Britain’s regionals slides and slides again? But it also apears occasionally on Radio 4's flagship Today...

There are always two sides but it doesn’t surprise me, either, that the press is little interested in balance. That’s less than newsworthy. Surely, everyone knows a tenner my not always be acceptable on a bus and that buses don’t take credit. Buses thrive on coinage, though sometime soon smartcards will be able to avoid the problems of change from larger denomination notes.

And what happened to the drivers’ procedure when faced with circumstances such as this? We’d guess from the W&D one-liner that the driver may well have followed it. Could it be that such a course was unacceptable to the couple and that they flounced off to the press?

And what of compensation for the couple whose ruined evening resulted in no Chinese meal-for-two and no subsequent proposal of marriage? To offer a meal on W&D signals to others that it might just be worth trying a stunt themselves, to get a free ride.

It's possible that the driver was towards the end of a hard shift. It might also be that the couple was just young and naïve. Whatever actually happened, the loser in this case, as elsewhere in Britain, is the bus operator. You can’t beat a PR negative such as this, in 32,000 copies of the Echo. All the good work from W&D on developing the crucial More Bus m5/6 between Poole & Canford Heath suddenly evaporates in an instant. Thanks to the press.