It can’t be easy being a bus driver. The incessant traffic, protests, rude and miserable people, the odd terrorist, heatwaves in the summer, freaky rain, wind or snow in the winter. I guess it is much like being a tour guide except we also have to put up with transport strikes!
I think the behaviour of bus passengers has gone down hill dramatically in the last 20 or 30 years. Dopey people who hold up the buses because having waited for ages, they still haven’t got their card or phone ready. People playing loud music or acting anti-social like today the two women on each side of me who put their disgusting feet up on the seats opposite them. I guess if it wasn’t so hot they’d put their shoes up.
Most of all is the way everyone presses the bell button. In the 80’s and 90’s bus drivers would tell passengers off or even stop the bus if the bell was rang unnecessarily. Now you can hear the bell be rung a dozen times or more for one stop. Likely because half the bus are obsessed with music or their phones so don’t hear the bells or see the big screens displaying “bus stopping”. Sometimes one person can ring it 4 or 5 times. It must make the drivers crazy, I know it does me. It’s not as if they have to press the bell to be allowed off. It only needs one ring. Surely by the time a passenger has been on the bus 2 or 3 times, they realise 10 people get off at the same stop as them?
So bus passengers are often though not totally annoying and bus drivers can be similarly miserable and annoying too in their own ways, particularly how they tolerate idiots who aren’t ready to pay but drive off knowing someone is 2 or 3 seconds from the bus stop.
Personally I always smile and befriend every bus driver. I nearly always get a positive reaction except for if they are a truly miserable sod. I get to know dozens of them and no doubt for my friendly behaviour, the bus will often stop right in front of me so I can get on first. Or even be allowed a free journey or two no doubt for smiling reasons and being on the news reasons.
Recent research has revealed that smiling at a London bus driver makes the driver feel happy. Who’d have thought that? It’s part of research aimed at making people more pleasant when they travel… i think they need to aim at the bell people… preferably with a high powered rifle 🙂
Whether this makes much difference it is hard to believe and yet all the way back in the 1940’s, a similar study of London bus drivers transformed epidemiology, medicine and the way we live now.
In the late 1940s, British doctors were worried. Britain, like many rich countries, was suffering from an “epidemic” of heart disease and no one knew why.
Experts came up with various hypotheses, such as stress, were suggested; but one thing that was not exercising researchers was exercise.
The idea that health and exercise were linked “wasn’t the accepted fact that we know today”, says Nick Wareham, a professor of epidemiology at Cambridge University. Some even felt that “too much physical activity was a bad thing for your health”.
It’s easy to see why in some ways. Navvies, miners and farm labourers did physical exercise by the spade-load. They also suffered disproportionately from various diseases, died young and often in poverty after a fairly miserable life.
At this time a young doctor called Jerry Morris started to suspect that the excess deaths from heart disease might be linked to occupation. He began studying the medical records of 31,000 London transport workers. His findings were breathtaking: ticket conductors, who spent their time running up and down stairs, had an approximately 30% lower incidence of disease than drivers, who sat down all day.
Jerry Morris then took a look at postal workers, and found a similar pattern: postmen (who walked all day) had far lower rates of disease than telephonists (who typically sat).
And so the revelation came to him that exercise was good for people and not just good but a difference of life and death.
Jerry decided to lead by example and on a walk with his daughter on Hampstead Heath he took off his jacket and gave it to her and just started running for no reason whatsoever. As he explained, “People thought I was bananas.”
And ever since more and more people have been following suit in one way or the other. Let’s hope Jerry smiled at the bus driver on the way home!
Stephen Liddell 