Whistleblower London bus drivers ‘exhausted’ and ‘use faulty vehicles’ in ‘dangerous’ conditions
London bus drivers have claimed that they work in 'dangerous' conditions, and they feel 'drowsy and fatigued' while on the job in sweltering cabs. Speaking exclusively as part of a MyLondon investigation, they also claimed to have driven vehicles with technical faults as engineers ‘can’t be a****’ to fix them.
A London bus driver, who has been in the job for more than 20 years, said: “Many of us feel ignored and treated like cattle, moved from operator to operator [...] This process causes a lot of uncertainty for living, family and pension arrangements.”
The driver also said that they often encounter a ‘threat of physical abuse’ and fatigue, and that there are ‘many instances daily of cabs, cars, trucks and bikes cutting too close, risking braking that would throw your passengers about’.
READ MORE: London bus service to village is axed leaving elderly 'having to walk 500 metres' to nearest stop
Further, the driver spoke about the effect working hours and alleged overtime have on colleagues. He said: “A large percentage of bus drivers don’t have a choice. They have to do overtime [...] That means they could be working up to 13 days on the trot. The basic point is, the wages are not high enough and drivers have to do overtime. Obviously that has an effect on their fatigue.”
‘Half the buses don’t have air conditioning, drivers sit in 40 degree heat’
He claimed that the onus for this has been put on the drivers, as bosses allegedly tell them to maintain a healthy diet and sleep well. In addition, the driver claimed that tiredness is exacerbated by heat as ‘half the buses don’t have air conditioning’.
“It’s obviously dangerous,” the driver said. “Under the health and safety directive, the drivers have been told by the union to basically stop, get out of the cab and drink water and cool down.” He added that he has heard of reports of colleagues sitting in 40 degree heat. This means stopping three, four or five times on a journey from one end of a route to the other, the driver explained.
He also told MyLondon that he has heard of colleagues being ‘abused’ after stopping and cooling down. “Not only that, then they get pressured by controllers as well,” the driver claimed, as bosses 'subtly’ ‘try to ‘swerve it’ and ‘mildly threaten’ employees by asking if drivers are ‘reporting sick’ or saying they are ‘unwell’. This is exacerbated by the workforce getting more ‘elderly’, he added, who also ‘need the toilet more’.
As regards what he has experienced, the driver recalled being ‘spat at’, ‘verbally abused’, including ‘threats to kill’, and having his cab screen ‘punched’ by a customer. This is ‘part of the job’, he added, but management allegedly ‘doesn’t really follow it up’.
‘Bully boy, strong arm management’
“The whole industry,” he added, “is very sort of post-Second World War, and still we’re kind of looking at kind of 80s-style management in some garages.”
“On the whole,” the driver claimed, “it’s a bit sort of, you know, bully boy, strong arm management.” This ‘varies’, with some ‘good garages working as a team’, he caveated.
The driver added: “The name of the game for the whole service is to obviously get the buses going and covering the mileage, and the supervisors or controllers, that’s their main aim. Commonly, I hear, and, it’s been my own experience, if you say there’s a fault with the bus, you know that immediately you’re being questioned [by superiors] as if you’re not being taken seriously as if you’re messing around or something.”
This means colleagues can be reluctant to report problems, the source went on to claim, as they ‘don’t want to be seen as a troublemaker’. “We’re hard men and women,” he said, “but we still don’t want to be seen as a troublemaker because your reputation affects your pay, basically, because then they withhold overtime.”
‘I was asked to drive a bus with a serious fault down Oxford Street’
The driver alleged: “I’ve been asked on one occasion to drive a bus with a serious fault down Oxford Street, from one end to the other. That was a while ago now, and I would like to think that sort of stuff doesn’t happen [anymore]. But the controllers, their main aim is, first and foremost, to get the bus running with passengers on it, and if they can cross examine a driver to satisfy themselves that they can just get away with it for a few miles, they’ll do that.”
Accidents, he predicted, will ‘keep happening’ unless there is a ‘major change’. This means paying the drivers more and working with managers as a team as opposed to feeling ‘detached’, he added.
A driver who has previously driven Tube trains told MyLondon that most people’s careers ‘go from buses to Tubes’, and, once they are working on the Underground, they ‘don’t come back to drive a bus’. Over time, he added, they ‘forget about the awful working conditions on the buses’.
‘The person on the radio just says, ‘you’ll be fine, driver’’
The driver claimed there is a ‘huge disparity’ between the two. He said: “It’s just ridiculous. The Underground is totally run for passenger safety, and for reliability, really. It’s all about safety, and the difference is, with the drivers, we’ve got autonomy over if the train’s defective. If the train’s defective, it’s out of service.
“The driver has that responsibility. He has the ability, the power, to do that, because he’s the person running the train. On the buses, we just literally call upon the radio, and then the person who’s on the other end of the radio assesses the situation [...] and then just says, ‘oh yeah, you’ll be fine, driver, carry on’. And it’s like, ‘no’.”
The driver added that he has had ‘a big stop sign’ flash up on his vehicle and a smoke alarm going off, only to allegedly be told to keep driving. He claimed that the ‘first reaction’ of his superiors is to suggest that it is ‘just a temperamental sensor’.
The driver told MyLondon that he had taken four buses back to the garage, and refused to drive them because of their condition. One had an issue with its air conditioning, the other with its ‘engine power’. “It just wasn’t there,” he said. On another occasion, the driver was worried about his vehicle’s brakes.
“With every bus that I’ve taken back,” he added, “I’ve literally seen them put another driver on, without checking it. They’ve put another driver on and sent them straight out again.” He believes the alleged incident is because operators ‘don’t have any spare buses’ because they are ‘short of money’.
The same driver also raised concerns about air temperatures in cabs and buses as a whole. He described conditions as ‘unbearable’, and says he has recorded temperatures of more than 40 degress.
‘The cabs are still sealed from Covid, which means there is no air flow’
The driver said: “Not a single bus in our garage has a working air conditioning, and cab temperatures regularly soar above 100 degrees [fahrenheit]. The cabs are still sealed from Covid, which means there is no air flow, even if we open our tiny eight-inch window. Many air vents are broken or stuck shut.” He added that air con ‘just blows [uncooled] air’.
He added: “Drivers have been pleading with the managers to fix the air conditioning via our communal message board, 'Blink'. Due to the lack of proper airflow, our only attempt at cooling is an old metal fan. Unfortunately, these fans regularly run at over 80 decibels, making it difficult for drivers to hear passengers asking questions.”
Conditions are made worse for drivers, he also claimed, because vents at the front of buses are ‘sealed up’ during the winter to stop drafts, and remain so during the summer. This makes it ‘impossible to get air flow in the cab’.
In addition, drivers, he claimed, do not get enough stand time - which is used to ‘de-stress’ - at the end of routes. “Guaranteed,” the driver said, “if they’ve given you 10 minutes stand time, by the time you get there, you’ve got two minutes, and that’ll be the time you have to go to the toilet."
He added: “There’s no sort of ability to keep your time and [for it to be a] relaxed, comfortable journey for you. Because, constantly, you get there, and you’re in a rush. You set off and you’re in a rush.”
Senior management ‘have league tables of garages losing the most mileage’
This is made worse, the driver claimed, every time there is a timetable change, as stand time is ‘redacted after every alteration’. He also alleged that senior management have ‘league tables’ as regards which garages are ‘losing the most mileage’, creating a ‘competitive spirit’, and ensuring managers ‘always say the bus is fit to drive’ if the driver expresses concerns.
This also means drivers do not get enough time to check the safety of their vehicles properly, the source alleged. He said: “We get given five minutes [...] They are ensuring that any driver who wants to check their bus properly, you’ve got to come into work five or 10 minutes earlier than what you’re being paid for. You can do it if everything’s perfect, but nothing’s ever perfect.”
On the routes he drives, the driver claimed, there is also a lack of drinking water facilities, because toilets ‘do not have drinking water taps in them’. One route, he can go up to five hours without water, the driver claimed. All of the above is a ‘bad combination’, he added.
A different driver told MyLondon: “I’ve been in the industry for a long time. So, I’ve seen it over that time, and there’s always been a blame culture. So, if a driver reports an accident that they were involved with, often the result is seen in a very simplistic sense.
“You have done something wrong. Or they often think that’s the case without even kind of analysing it. I’ve been in situations where there are kind of systematic issues.” They alleged that cameras have been installed in buses to ‘catch the driver’ making mistakes rather than ‘correcting the system’ and looking out for ‘latent problems’.
In addition, they claimed there are ‘more than half a dozen’ different dashboard arrangements that drivers have to learn, and that some buttons and switches are ‘on opposite sides of the dashboard’, meaning that drivers could spend days using one and then another where controls are in ‘very different places’.
“They’ll be out there disciplining you rather than looking and being introspective about the system,” the driver added. “When these things go wrong, and there is a consequence, and you put your hand up and put in a report for it, then [...] they’ll be out there disciplining you rather than looking and being introspective about the system.”
They also said: “And if you think about the psychological environment that the drivers are driving with, you have controllers that sometimes can be quite [...] unpleasant and unprofessional. But also, if you talk about blame culture, if they think you’re going slowly and you should be going faster, which is a kind of a performance issue, then you can be reported to your manager, and they can discipline you."
‘I find that I get drowsy as I’m driving around’
The source added: “They’re not very good, at least, at making sure your biological needs are kind of met, and that’s true in the cabs as well. So when you’re talking about heat, sometimes you have issues with heat in the winter. I could often face a bus where the heating isn’t working, or fully working.”
They also claimed they sometimes work with cold feet as warm air is not directed downwards. This makes them ‘numb’, they say. Alternatively, the heat in cabs can be ‘immense’ as employees are ‘sitting there sweltering and sticky from hours of sweating’. This exacerbates fatigue, the driver claimed.
They said: “I find that I get drowsy as I’m driving around, and that’s because the air conditioning is often not working in those things [...] In the heat of the summer, you’ll be fighting off drowsiness as you’re driving. Even in the middle of the day, even with good sleep.”
Another bus driver said: “The safety around drivers, there’s not really that much safety. The assault screens aren’t that good, and we still get abused and everything like that.” This is especially the case, he added, at the first and the last bus stop as people can ‘see you stood there’.
The driver added that passengers are often jumping onto his bus through the back door to avoid paying the fare. He said: “When we try and do our jobs and challenge it, we get abuse. I’ve been called a racist before, and it’s just ridiculous. I just don’t think TfL have actually thought through the idea of the three door buses.
“It’s a lot easier with just two doors - people get on through the front and people get off through the back. People are used to that. A third door, they’re just confused.”
‘I had to sit pretty much on the floor for the whole trip’
He then recalled an alleged recent instance when he was 'unable to adjust the height of his steering wheel'. “To stop my leg from getting caught I had to sit pretty much on the floor for the whole trip,” the driver said.
“As I’m driving, my leg’s getting caught under the steering wheel now. So I was like, ‘okay, this is not safe.’ So I pulled over, phoned [the garage] up, and they’re like, ‘yeah, you’re too far away from the garage. You need to bring it down closer to the garage before we can do anything. But what we’ll do is we’ll get a bus there for you. When you get there, we’ll sub out your bus, pretty much.’
“And I get down there and there’s an engineer who’s like, ‘yeah, I’m here just to fix the height adjuster pedal.’” The driver claimed that his bus’ cameras also were not working, so he ‘couldn’t even see the doors’. The bus worker then alleged that he asked the engineer if they would fix the CCTV. The engineer, it is claimed, replied, ‘no’, and said that he could use his mirrors instead.
The driver said he then told the engineer that he could not see the third door at the back of the bus without CCTV, and claimed that he was then told ‘we’ll just leave it for the next driver’, because his shift was finishing soon. This, he told MyLondon, is what ‘most engineers’ do ‘when they can’t be a***** to fix it’.
The driver then described another alleged incident, whereby the bumper of a bus was 'falling off'. He said: “I’ve had it before where, a few weeks ago, the front bumper was falling off, and I phoned them, I looked at it when I took over, and I went, ‘this bumper’s not going to last long.’
“So I phoned them, and they were like, ‘okay, when you come back down, we’ll get an engineer there waiting for you so he can look at it’ [...] I get down there, and there’s no engineer there. I phoned them and by the time I’ve actually moved my bus forward now, the front bumper has actually fallen off completely. So then I lost a whole trip because of their incompetence of sorting out engineers.”
The driver also described how he was often left with not enough rest because of shift patterns. He said: “The time between bus shifts, compared to coach shifts, is so much less time [...] I technically think they should actually look at it all.” He claimed that he currently finishes work at 3am and starts back at 12pm.
Recently, there was an instance, he claimed, when he finished at 3am, got home at 5.30am and then started at 12.30pm the next day. Because of train strikes, he had to be up at 10.30am. “There weren’t really much rest there for me,” the driver said.
A former London bus driver, who left his role in 2021, claimed that his colleagues were ‘falling asleep at the wheel’, and engineers told drivers to ‘carry on’ when hazard lights were blinking and ‘major systems were failing’. This also included ‘being rushed while carrying out first-use checks by garage bosses’.
In addition, the former driver, who says he remains in contact with those still on the roads - claimed that his colleagues were ‘harassed or sacked’ because they complained about ‘known-but-unresolved’ safety problems.
He said: “TfL’s contracted bus operation is entirely focused on bus drivers keeping to time, and anything that takes time out of that operation - like rest breaks, toilet breaks, meal breaks, congestion, driving safely to road conditions, not speeding, minding other road users, ensuring passengers with special needs can board and get in place safely - puts pressure on bus drivers to make up time on the road. Bus operators are only incentivised by TfL to keep to time and bus operators put extreme and unrelenting pressure on bus drivers to achieve the unrealistic contracted timetable targets (regardless of road conditions) that they and TfL have agreed.”
He added: “Passengers are only happy when the bus is on time and gets to where they want to go quickly. They don’t care if we're forced to drive fatigued, sick, distracted or overstressed. In fact, they never ask. As long as their bus is on time and gets to the place where and when they want it, that's all passengers care about.”
The source also described current working conditions for drivers as ‘inhumane’ as they have been operating in an ‘unjust culture’ for ‘decades’. He then called for a ‘fundamental change’.
The former driver said: “By only measuring time as money, TfL guarantees that bus drivers’ working conditions will get worse and its culture will remain unsafe for bus drivers, road users and passengers.”
London Assembly recommendations
On March 18, the London Assembly’s Transport Committee published the findings of an investigation into fatigue experienced by bus drivers. It concluded that TfL and bus operators should ‘change the culture around self-reporting and ensure that fatigue is taken seriously’.
Assembly Members set out the below recommendations:
Share the lessons learned from its pan-TfL Fatigue Working Group and Oversight Group
Develop an action plan by September 2024 on how it will implement those lessons from trams (and other modes) systematically across bus operators
Commission new research on shift lengths, patterns and rotas, including data on bus drivers’ experiences of investment such as rest facilities and toilets
The committee also urged the mayor to commission an independent safety risk assessment for TfL from a ‘reputable independent authority’ which would investigate:
The role and punctuality incentives in bus contracts, with emphasis on the stressful conditions these incentives might create for Bus Drivers, including those which cause fatigue
The time pressures that bus drivers face
Analysis of Speed Compliance Tool data
Tom Kearney of the campaign group London Bus Watch is a businessman who has pushed for bus safety improvements since he was critically injured in an Oxford Street bus crash in December 2009. He told the committee: “Fatigue driving is absolutely the issue that bus drivers that I am in contact with say is the most absolutely important thing. They work ten to 12 hours a day and then they do not have any time to sleep because they have their own families and obviously their own issues.
“If you are rostering these people five, six, seven, eight days in a row, plus rest-day working, you are talking about someone who cannot perform their job in a way that is safe for anyone, including themselves. Take away toilets on one quarter of the routes and make them perform in 40 degree [Celsius] cabs, you are just compounding the issue.”
In 2017 , the Assembly also investigated the ‘root causes’ of 25 deaths caused by buses in London, and 12,000 injuries, in the past two years. Politicians also sought to identify how TfL can prevent them.
Assembly Members recommended that TfL:
Sets safety targets for bus operators as soon as possible
Revises its senior staff bonus scheme to introduce a direct link between bus safety and performance-related payments
Improves the data it uses for bus safety analysis and trend reporting
Reduces the number of distractions and difficulties facing drivers
Delivers driver safety training, in the same way it delivers customer service training
Reviews bus maintenance practices in garages
TfL and operators 'working together on a range of measures'
Tom Cunnington, TfL's Head of Buses Business Development, said: "Bus drivers play an essential role in keeping the capital moving and their welfare is a top priority for us. We take safety extremely seriously and will be investigating any reports or allegations made by drivers. We would like to reassure staff that any reports from drivers are always fully investigated and our operators should never take action against people raising concerns about welfare or safety. We encourage any driver with concerns to contact their employer, their union, or contact us directly. We are fully committed to working together with operators to improve conditions.”
TfL and London's bus operators say they 'take driver welfare seriously' and are 'working together on a range of measures to improve health and wellbeing and to combat fatigue'. Further information is available here. MyLondon also asked Sadiq Khan's office for comment.
Are you a bus driver and worried about your working conditions? Email adam.toms@reachplc.com
Get the latest travel news from London's roads, trains and buses with our new London Traffic and Travel newsletter. You can sign up HERE.