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Lunchtime on the 29 and most people aren’t paying
• I AM so sick of witnessing the blatant theft taking place daily on London’s “bendy bus” routes that, where possible, I choose the conventional bus routes rather than the bendy buses, even if that costs me time, because I can’t bear to see this in-your-face crime, and I am not courageous or foolish enough to challenge it.
Last Friday lunchtime I took a 29 from Mornington Crescent to Holloway Road; I stood for the whole journey in the area by the third set of doors at the back. During that time 63 people got on through those doors; 13 of those did not touch their Oyster cards to the reader. Five of them were young people (maybe waiting for new travel cards in the post) but the remaining eight appeared to have no reason for not paying.
That was a snapshot of one part of one bus in one part of a day. Multiply that across all bendy routes and you are looking at theft on a major scale.
Ken Livingstone believed that these buses would speed transit because of the three boarding doors; he naively expected people to be honest and pay up. Wrong!
The length of these buses means they often block box and other junctions and they are costing Londoners a fortune in unpaid revenue.
Boris Johnson has the right idea – scrap them, and scrap them now.
David Collins
N4
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