COMMENT with ALAN MILLAR
For far too long, there has been an impression — grounded in a lot of reality — that many of our buses are bought by men in suits from other men in suits. Or more troublingly, bought by habitually car-driving men in suits from company car-driving salesmen in suits.
Let us put two of these parts of the story out of the equation: the men and the suits. They are irrelevant. Some of the men maybe never wear suits. And women may be buying or selling. But the cars are highly relevant to this practice, as they suggest that the people doing the buying and selling rarely step aboard a bus to get anywhere in their daily lives and can too easily be detached from the needs and expectations of the hundreds of thousands of passengers for whom the buses are built and bought.
This can show. Seats with insufficient legroom. Seats perched awkwardly on wheelarches. Seats with no cushion worth the name. Upholstery with no grip. Next to no luggage space where it is needed. Window pillars where they obscure the view. Solid backs giving no rear view whatsoever. Big electronic information monitors plonked in the middle of a top deck windscreen and blocking out the forward view. You can probably get t…
