Friday 10 July 2020

Bus Stop Blues

Imagine running a business where the Government recommend your customers not use your services and then compensates you for your losses... this is the neo-normative fantasy world we live in now. These double-deckers can take over seventy passengers sitting and standing (at a warm fuggy squeeze) but are limited to no more than twenty face-masked and fear filled voyagers. I say twenty but the bus I was on into east Hull the other day had many more than that thankfully or folk would have been left behind. Even the worst laid schemes o' mice and men gang agley it seems.
The picture is Cottingham Green bus stop but in nearby Hull the bus lane scheme has been extended to run all daylight hours not to help buses, no, no, buses are bad, bad I tells you ... no it's to help cyclists who are supposed to take advantage of this benefice and fill the gap made by mad bucking of the market (let me check yes I did write bucking glad I got that right). Now of course cyclists won't suddenly appear; Hull is after all one the most obese, cigarette smoking places in the country (part of its lasting charm I suppose) ... instead the extra cars on the road carrying disgruntled bus passengers (now lost forever I assume) will be squeezed into even less space and Hull's familiar gridlock problem will no doubt return should the economy ever get back out of the deep hole it's in. 

4 comments:

  1. For awhile our buses were running free. Now it's masks mandatory.

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  2. This covid-19 stuff is making life oh-so-complex. And it is all so new, it is hard to know the correct response to any problem. I do wonder, though, if N95 masks and a little distancing would keep transmissions down. (If the numbers stay down for a few weeks, I've read it is possible to achieve almost zero transmissions dropping eventually to zero new cases.) Good luck!

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  3. You can drive out covid with a pitchfork, but it always comes roaring back again... No matter how low the case numbers, it's going nowhere. New cases in China, Spain... We need to learn to live with it.

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  4. We could be going back to the 17th century. A permanent background to daily life is a pestilence which can flare up at any time and cause many venues to be closed.

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