There are times when I travel by bus as a passenger, to get from A to B. Always alert, I will pick up on any concerns or issues. I will intervene, for example, if passengers are having a moan by explaining who I am and trying to put matters right. If the bus isn’t one of mine, I pass on anything serious.
Then there are other times when I try to sample the bus for no other reason than to meet customers/passengers. This is always valuable and often quite revealing.
During the summer, I met with an older gentleman who had a list of minor gripes. He stated he was aware that disabled people with only one arm could drive a specially adapted car. Was it true that we employed a driver with one arm and that we had made appropriate changes to one of our buses?
In my mind, I recalled a story I’d been told some years earlier of a former northern municipal operator that’d either adapted a bus for one of its drivers or retained an older, life-expired one well after its “sell by date” because it better suited a particular driver. This, apparently, was upon the insistence of the union. To me, the story sounded a little like an urban myth because what happened when the driver was on spare or when he had to make a crew change or when the special bus was off the road. But we can all look back at times when unions made occasional off-the-wall demands.
Back to my passenger. Well, I should’ve seen it coming. When I said “no” we had no one-armed drivers, he immediately asked why did we countenance drivers driving with one hand on the wheel, then. An interesting point. The gent went on to say that during the June hot weather he’d even witnessed a driver eating an ice cream while at the wheel. He could give no date or time.
What was even more worrying was what I saw immediately I got off the bus. Coming towards me was a single deck with a driver with one hand on the wheel and the other limply on the cash tray. We were between stops and all I could do at the time was give the driver one of those Paddington Bear hard stares in the hope that he would remember it latter…
Thursday, 30 September 2010
Passenger Contact
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
Regarding one-armed drivers, I recall hearing a story about (I think) the proprietor of a coach firm in Bristol, who had lost an arm during World War 2, but was allowed to continue driving after demonstrating his technique for changing gear to the driving examinations body (whatever it was called at the time!) I cannot vouch for the story, but perhaps somebody else can.
A little more on the one-armed driver:-
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fray_bentos/539235964/
Driving with one hand in my area is common place. Perhaps it is the quality of body construction (or lack of) that leads so many drivers here in London to need to hold on to the cash tray, assault screen or other parts of the cab rather than the steering wheel!!!
As I've seen suggested elsewhere, a thirty minute session in a crash box half cab up and down some hills should give the offenders an appreciation of what they have and how to use it.
I blame it on the enforced wearing of eppaulettes. They give you shoulder ache.
So can modern buses be modified with the steering spinner and thumb controls for one-hand operation then? The benefit could be twofold - a) it enables disabled people to become PSV/PCV drivers, and b) able-bodied drivers could legitimately use one hand to steer and the other to change fare stages etc.
Anonymous said...
"So can modern buses be modified with the steering spinner and thumb controls for one-hand operation then?"
It is almost certainly technically possible - the range of adaptations available to enable people with disabilities to drive cars demonstrate that. The majority are designed to enable all of the control functions to be performed using the hands, but other variants do exist; and some enable the steering to be performed with one hand. Whether there is a greater safety risk when such controls are used for larger vehicles is perhaps debatable; and no doubt the health and safety people would deliberate for years before any such system was allowed to be used.
Given the extent of the use of electronics in control systems, it would probably even be possible to use a joystick!
In my opinion it's not one-handed control that causes a problem, so long as the other hand doesn't wander to count change, fiddle with the ticket machine or otherwise distract the brain that controls both...
The one-armed driver in Bristol was Len Munden.
Post a Comment