Bending the Bus Statistics

SNATCHING a few precious moments from the 24/7 Ian Blair rescue operation, Ken found a new way of claiming his accident-prone bendy buses are, in fact, safe. “Between 1994 and 2006, there were seven fatalities for every billion passenger journeys on a bendy bus [compared with] 11 on new double and single deckers,” he says, accusing me of “falsifying” the statistics.

Nobody ever claimed bendy buses were more dangerous for passengers. It’s other road users they maim and kill. They cause 5.6 pedestrian injuries per million miles, compared with 2.6 for other buses. That’s not a “falsification”, it’s a written answer Ken gave to the London Assembly not six months ago.

The rather more heartening figures preferred by the Mayor may be explained by the fact that there were no bendy buses in London until 2002 in other words, eight years after he chose to start the comparison. Tell you what, Ken you could do even better by taking the baseline back to, say, 1394, and including 500-plus years of no buses at all..

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