I led deputation of representatives from older peoples’ organisations to Peter Hendy to present views on bus driver behaviour.

I have been leading a big campaign for the last couple of years to try and get the bus companies and Transport for London to up the standard not only of bus driving, but also of behaviour. Of course, there are loads of really good,

sweet drivers – but according to my post bag there also a load of not so good ones.

I had been conducting a survey gradually across London’s boroughs and had compiled the results to date for the meeting as well as a list of individual cases of injury and, sadly, one death due to bad driving.

The overall results indicated that about 85% of people had experienced bad driving. The main complaints were: driving too fast, stopping to abruptly, not drawing into the curb, using a mobile phone, not putting down the ramp and driving without concern for the bus user or other traffic.

It was a very good meeting and Peter Hendy (TfL’s MD for surface transport) went through everything with us. Some good things are being done on driver training – but it was clear that training and retraining will take years. Better I thought, was his rather robust approach to engineering progress, whereby he was looking at perhaps changing the breaking mechanisms and looking at speed limiters. Perhaps engineering changes and better and more training will result in a real change in the future.