At the start of the year I was dismayed yet unsurprised to find an article on the BBC News website stating that the rights of wheelchair users to use their assigned space on the bus is still not being enforced by bus companies, against TFL guidelines for their various providers of bus services, which states they must try and assist (which includes actions up to and including stalling the bus then waiting for people to make space). Driver resistance to helping us access the wheelchair space seems to be the norm, not the exception in my decade as a wheelchair user in London, especially in the area which I used to live and from the bus company which operates there. I’ve written about this topic numerous times, and even successfully claimed against that specific bus company on two occasions. My claims against Arriva North London were settled in 2020 and 2023, but nothing seems to have changed, hence my dismay. For a short while I felt like things might be improving – there was a period in late 2019/early 2020 where I noticed drivers on my frequent routes were more helpful when asked to intervene, but this ended with lockdown. It was like they forgot disabled passengers existed at all after we weren’t able to travel for most of a year and were then inconvenienced by our return. I moved out of London a couple of years ago, but when I’m back visiting and trying to get to the tube station from my dad’s, the drivers on that exact route still try to shrug off their responsibility, which combined with the attitude from Arriva during our many discussions explains my lack of surprise at the BBC report. I’ve not written a lot about the actual cases against Arriva, mostly because life (Covid, house move, brainfog) got in the way, but I will detail a few things here about the attitude of the higher-ups in the company and why I believe things will not get better for wheelchair users of their bus routes until this changes.

Almost immediately I was told pretty much verbatim “we can’t do anything about the drivers” as if they were in an ironclad union running separately to the company that trained and employed them. One manager said that if he fired a driver, even for repeatedly discriminating against wheelchair users, that driver would be able to walk right into another bus driving job no questions asked, “so what’s the point?”. This left me rather gobsmacked – it sounded like the company was saying the drivers were untouchable, untrainable, and not their responsbility. But I didn’t want anyone sacked in any case, just to do their job as laid out in the Red Book (TFL bus driver manual). My solicitor and I tried to nail down one condition of settling as a commitment to adequate training, Arriva North London being one of the few TFL subcontractors which doesn’t have user-led training – i.e. a real life disabled person talking to trainee drivers about the necessity of public transport, access and how dehumanising it feels when a driver doesn’t even let you ask people to make space and drives off without you. (It feels incredibly dehumanising, as I think you can guess. It feels like I am optional, lesser, an unwanted hassle.) Again, we were shot down. “We can’t pull drivers out of work to give them extra training”. Well, that’s not what we were asking, but they could try and train them fully in the first place, to the same industry standards as most other transport companies do. This was also dismissed as being too expensive and I ended up being offered a nice shiny carrot in the form of a starring role in a video about wheelchair access to buses, potentially to be shown in training. It’d probably be very like what they already have – nothing is as effective as user-led training – and apparently Arriva North London would rather continually pay out to disabled passengers who have been discriminated against and back up their drivers, even those that repeatedly break the rules, than try to ensure a good reputation via stellar training. I know many people aren’t in the position to give time and energy over to making a claim against a large company with lawyers on retainer, but I believe if more of us did this then they would eventually start to budge. (Also no one ever contacted me about that video.)

But what of now? Well, I’ve not made a complaint against a bus company since 2023*. And why is that? We moved to Norwich in the summer of 2023, and in that time I have had zero problems with the bus companies that run here (although I’m not counting issues with rail replacement buses – that’s for another day!). I don’t take the bus quite as often as I did in London, because it’s a much smaller city and on a nice day I can get to anywhere I need to in the city without having to use public transport, but I still use it relatively frequently and have never yet encountered an issue like the ones I had with Arriva. In fact, the only problems I’ve had with buses since moving have been when back in London to visit! So how it is that buses in this small city of ~200,000 people are so much better for wheelchair users than those in a metropolis of 15 million?

The first reason is based on bus design. The double-decker buses here have a space for a wheelchair user and a separate one for buggies. Both areas have fold down seats which passengers can use, but they have to move when the spaces are needed. I have missed a bus before because there was already a wheelchair user on it (no issue!), and in peak times, especially because my nearest stop is on a university route, sometimes the bus is just packed full and I can’t get on – but neither can anyone else so it doesn’t feel like I’m being singled out for being a wheelchair user! The other reason is that the ramps are still manual fold-out ramps, the kind the driver has to get out of their cab to open and close. They’re not hi-tech like the computer-controlled ones in London, but I’ve also never had one go wrong, get stuck, refuse to deploy or leave me stuck on a bus for 2 hours while we wait for an engineer to be free to come with the tool that can manually crank it open. There is another post to come about the issues with those electronic ramps, I can feel it brewing.

So what to do about the ongoing issues in London? I wish more disabled passengers felt able to put in claims with teeth against bus companies that discriminate. If anyone does want to know more about doing this, feel free to get in touch via email or comment and I can give you some pointers. We need to keep lobbying for the right to use the wheelchair space as wheelchair users, lobbying for user-led training and for real action to be taken when we are denied access instead of endless meaningless apologies. Above all, don’t shy away from taking public transport because of a fear of conflict. The more we are out there living our day-to-day lives, the more people will realise that disabled people are a part of this society whose inclusion deserves to be accommodated.

* A little primer on my complaint protocol: Not all Bus Issues result in an official complaint being made, which some people might disagree with, but I have to pick my battles. I only complain if it ends with the bus leaving without me. If the driver refuses to assist or initially says I can’t board but lets me ask people to make space myself, then I’ll let it go. Thanks to experience, I now always email for the CCTV from the bus, and explain that I have done this in my complaint. Without it there would be no proof to back up my claims, and though I do sometimes record video myself that can be viewed as confrontational and detrimental to my aim of actually getting on the bus.