There was chaos in Victoria for about 30 minutes this morning – a National Express driver stopped his bus and refused to go any further! Here’s a picture of the ‘parked’ bus.

The bus is exiting Victoria Coach Station arrivals and joining Elizabeth Street. The problem is the red lorry which you see ahead of the bus, it’s parked on double yellow lines and had been unloading scaffolding. It’s made the turn out of arrivals quite difficult to do, you are emerging from a relatively narrow gap and as you turn left the back of the bus swings right and if you’re not got clear of the buiding you’re emerging from the back will clout the building! So you need to drive as far forward as possible before turning. I’d exited arrivals about 20 minutes before I heard of this stand off between this driver and National Express. The lorry was there then, I looked at it, thought about it, juggled it round in my head and knew it would be OK and just drove out ….. no big bang from the back :-)

However, I can well understand the driver’s reaction and initially had sympathy for him. If he thought there was a real risk of damaging his bus then he did the absolutely correct thing by not going ahead with the manoeuvre whatever peer pressure might have been applied. I would have admired his courage in standing up for what he thought was right if he hadn’t refused to let another driver take the bus out for him! He would let no other National Express driver into the bus and refused to reverse it back into arrivals and thereby unblock Elizabeth Street. That was plain stupidity. The even more ludicrous aspect of all this was that eventually (after 30 minutes) he got back into the driving seat, moved the bus forward, turned left and drove off up the road without a problem!