woblog

While waiting in a queue for the drivers to change over on my number 211 bus this morning at Waterloo, I witnessed both the ugly side, and a really good side of Londoners.  The disembarking driver from the early morning shift tore a strip of paper from the ticket machine, screwed it up and threw it into the street under the noses of half a dozen queuing passengers.  There was a silent consternation in the queue as we all frowned and contemplated the blatant littering of the London streets by a public service worker.

I was still trying to work out if I was brave enough to pick it up and bin it (the answer would almost certainly have been no) when a lady in the queue went for it instead, passing it back to the driver with a polite “You’ve dropped this”.  He began by denying it, at which point other passengers (not me, I was still, um, weighing up my options) chimed in and pointed out he had.  A colleague with a clip board, presumably his supervisor, calculating that the driver was not going to get away with his denial, decided on a different tactic.  “There aren’t any bins on the buses and there aren’t any bins outside the buses, so we have to use the street.”, he said.  There was some more outrage from the assembled passengers, and more belligerent shoulder shrugging from the offender and his boss, before they left the scene remarking that “There’s more important things than litter!”.

The public spirited woman remarked after they’d gone that she was glad she’d made a stand, and I was glad she had too.  However depressing the littering act and subsequent attitude had been, it was refreshing to see a member of the public, braver than I, standing up for us all and the city we live in.

Just in case anyone from TFL fancies educating this BAD bus driver and his idiot supervisor, he was driving the 211 (bus number 9816) and was disembarking the bus at Waterloo at 9:20am on Tuesday 29 April 2008.