Rewind

This time last week, a drunken passenger tried to rest control of an express double deck, with potentially fatal consequences. It resulted in a somewhat mute media reaction, perhaps because no one died in the toppling. Imagine what might’ve happened, though, had the Oxford Tube crash been more serious. This surely would’ve been the case had it not been 0200 on a bank holiday. At peak times, both the motorway and the 80-odd seater might’ve been full.

As it was, with every toppling, people will tend to build up a picture in their minds about double deck express coaches, their centres of gravity, their stability and their safety. Whether this will make a transient or lasting impression remains to be seen. Expect the parallel though slightly less frequent single deck-operated Oxford Espress to enjoy something of a short-term fillip, though.

Now, rewind to 2002. Evidence would point to a school child interfering with the driver’s steering wheel or controls that resulted in a double deck school bus leaving the road. It didn’t quite topple but the 12-year-old child in the nearside front upper deck seat died as he hit a tree. Ever since, Wales has been consumed by school bus safety. There’ve been calls to abandon double in favour of single decks with seemingly much progress, though we’re not aware this has happened everywhere.

These two incidents are far apart and would suggest that a passenger grabbing the wheel is remote. But they show a potential vulnerability with double decks. Neither vehicle was fitted with a driver assault screen. Such screens aim to prevent a physical attack but they also guard against a passenger lunging at the wheel. A great many urban buses have them and, coupled with their inherently lower road speeds, urban deckers might be presumed to be “safe”. That doesn’t stop schools or parents from calling for single decks instead, though.

We should be grateful that the media concentrated on the driver’s heroic efforts and the lunacy of the crazed passenger. For resting control away from the driver could so easily affect a single deck coach, with similar consequences if should leave the road and ascend a bank, as the Stagecoach Astromega did. Once a single deck loses its legs, the consequences are actually potentially more serious. The dynamics of a double deck mean it will *only* topple, whereas a single deck might fall & roll. With either design, someone not wearing a seat belt may end up first ejected and then crushed by the considerable weight of either vehicle type. Here, seat belts seemed to have saved the day and this surely must be a lesson for all who travel on coaches.

National Express has already taken an all-single-deck decision, following the M25/M4 toppling. It never really trumpeted this in the same way that The Oxford Bus Company’s Espress isn’t now, probably because no vehicle design is immune.

We’re some way off Stagecoach making such a decision, no doubt because of its investment in the Tube and on Megabus. But anxious Stagecoach executives returning to work after the summer last or this week will nevertheless have something on their minds. Meanwhile, if passengers abandon double decks in favour of cars, surely this will have a potentially higher road safety impact on everyone.