This bus shelter has been drawn to my attention by the Daily Mail reporting its latest theme – World Cup.

I’d not heard of this bus shelter before but it seems to have a huge following and its own “official Web site of the Unst Bus Shelter”.

On Friday afternoon it was noticed that a lintel in the bus station appeared to be crumbling and the ‘elf ‘n safety people feared that it may collapse and take every living soul, and every bus, within the bus station with it! So we are shut down until the structural engineers pronounce the bus station either safe or not fit for habitation. All buses are currently departing from the Broadway which is the road at the front of the bus station. Normally the only local buses to use this area for pick ups and and drop offs are the number 5 local bus and the Park and Ride services. It’s main purpose is for tour coaches to drop off and pick up their passengers as well as being used by scheduled National Express coaches. Of course chaos ensued yesterday as local buses tried to share this limited space with coaches from all over Europe dropping off tourists for the Cathedral and Winchester tours. There’s an added problem with foreign coaches, all the doors are on offside of the bus when it’s driving on the left side of the road. As the passengers disembark they do so into the road effectively making the coach about 50% wider than it really is.

This is a picture of the cordoned off bus station. Just before I took this picture there were two buses parked there, one acting as the bus station office and the other as a driver’s rest room. The driver’s rest bus had to be rushed into service because another of our buses smashed its windscreen on a tree in the Broadway. Apart from the congestion in the Broadway it’s also lined with trees which are growing very close to the edge of the pavement with some leaning slightly over the road. Normally you just need to be careful not to bang the mirror but someone misjudged it a little worse than that yesterday. You also have to be very careful with a double decker because of the lean on the trees toward the road and the camber of the road leaning the bus toward the trees.

Stopping for ‘runners’ in Winchester that is’.   By coincidence I wrote about this subject exactly a year ago.  I wrote then that I had no problem with stopping for someone running for a bus with 2 hourly frequency but not on town services with 10 minute frequency.   The problem is that the bus I drive from Winchester to Salisbury has a frequency of at best one every 2 hours BUT follows the first section of a 15 minute frequency local bus when it leaves the bus station.  Twice last week I stopped for a runner only to be asked for a ticket to a couple of stops up the road and which is more than adequately served by the local 15 minute frequency bus just behind me.  Well that’s it from now on, no more stopping.  I’m sorry if you are running for me as the last bus of the day to Salisbury but it’s been spoiled for you by impatient, thoughtless, local runners!

When I’m arriving back in Winchester a similar annoyance often occurs but I don’t have the option of ignoring them as I have with runners.  The buses on my route are older buses which are not kneeling buses, don’t have low floors, have at least two steps to board them and have no buggy space.  Yet still people at bus stops with buggies still insist on sticking their arm out to request the bus.  If a passenger requests a bus to stop it’s a ‘no no’ to carry on.  I stop and explain that to use this bus they’ll need to fold the buggy, carry it up the steps and then stow it in the luggage rack “There’ll be local low floor bus along in a couple of minutes, much easier for you to wait for that” is my usual suggestion.  But no, they want to go now, this moment, on this bus.  So they get the child out of the buggy, fold the thing up, start up the steps with the folded buggy usually struggling to get it past the pole at which point I’m often able to announce “There goes the bus you really wanted, it’s just passed us”!