andrewducker | Interesting Links for 11-11-2018

Crossposts: https://andrewducker.livejournal.com/3739869.html

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Most of our buses have some of the spring-loaded flip up seats. More or less depending on the configuration of the bus and what job the bus is doing. They are more common on single-decker buses. They have a handy sign on the bottom of them to tell passangers that they will return to upright after the stand up. I find that sort of attention to detail reassuring.

We don't have the more manual ones. I don't know that I've ever seen them.

To be honest I think that having the driver stop and leave the cab might be controversial in Edinburgh because of the extra time it adds to loading and unloading. The centre of our city is, to use a bit of technical jargon, "fair rammed fu' o' eejits oan bikes, tossers in Landies and buses, man, o' the buses, and dinnae get me started oan the trams". Specifically the entry and exit paths from Princes Street are often overloaded. I change buses at the junction of Princes Street and one of the exit paths. Narrow, tight 5 way junction. There are two bus stops, 15 feet apart, serving about a dozen different bus routes. Between them they handle about 48 buses an hour, at rush hour probably a bus a minute. There is space for two buses to stack at one bus stop and 3 to stack at the other bus stop. If another bus turns up (or a lorry delivering beer to the one of the pubs, or an idiot in a Land Rover getting stuck in one of the lanes) then the buses start to back up on to the main junction of Princes Street, blocking the tram and the other three main exits from Princes Street at that end. Five minutes of that and we have a traffic jam stretching the entire length of Princes Street and 5,000 people on buses and trams that are not moving.

The double decker bus I was on this mornng had one buggy space and one wheel chair space.

One double door at the front left, next to the driver. The bus has some sort of variable suspension and a rather cool drawbridge / ramp that deploys if anyone in a wheelchair wants to get on. Or if the driver thinks you are being cheeky and wants to jab you in the ankles.

Narrowish corridor past the stairs on the right hand side of the bus and the left front wheel housing. The wheel chair bay is on the left-had side. You back your wheelchair up against a cushioned rest facing backwards down the length of the bus. I think this is so that in the event of a sharp deceleration any wheelchair user is pushed in to a cushioned rest rather than tipped over sideways. This seems to be a design standard on British public transport - to keep wheelchairs facing parallel to the direction of travel.

There is a single, spring-loaded seat facing forwards. Behind that is the buggy space next to the first of the fixed front facing double seats.

When not in use by wheeled conveyance users both of those spaces double up as standing room for communters. This seems to be most of the time, certainly at rush hour. I can go months without seeing a wheelchair user on the bus. My guess is that they avoid travelling at rush hour if they can because it's much more difficult. In a sense the wheelchair spaces are convertable from a wheelchair space to 5 standing spaces.

And this where we bump in to the my question about design choices. Edinburgh commuters seem okay standing when they are on one of the hop-on hop-off urban routes but grumpy about it when coming from the suburbs.

It's a bit of mystery given that Toronto is running Alexander Dennis 500's and the new buses that Lothian have bought are Alexander Dennis 400's.

There is a mobility device user on about every third public transit ride I take on urban buses or suburban bendy-buses in the Greater Toronto Area. Every subway ride I take seems to have at least one or more users. I haven't ridden enough of the new-style streetcars or double-decker buses to make an assessment.

I don't know if the greater usage is due to the greater number of available spaces, or if the greater number of available spaces is due to the greater usage. It may also be due to the sprawling nature of Toronto - it may be less convenient to just wheel over to your destination than it would be in Scotland (especially in deep snow), forcing more people to take transit.

I've never tested this for obvious reasons but I think that if one had an electric wheelchair or one of those mobilty scooters one could travel faster than a bus can through central Edinburgh during rush hour. Probably also when it wasn't rush hour.

Toronto has about five times the population of Edinburgh and Edinburgh has quite a high population density. It wouldn't surprise me if demand for wheelchair spaces was significantly lower. But also, we might be being bastards to wheelchair users.

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Interesting Links for 11-11-2018

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