Tasty: Bike to the bus cafe

As we know, bus drivers can sometimes be a problem. Now, don't get me wrong - I rarely have wrong words with bus drivers, mainly because I can't understand what they're shouting at me, and I recognise that it's only the badly-behaved majority that tar the rest with the same brush - but we rather like the novelty of having a friendly encounter with a bus.


So here's your opportunity: Foodmaster, a double-decker bus converted into a mobile cafe. It serves top coffee and cakes, and hearty German sausages, and is currently doing a season in Mile End park every week (by the Art Pavilion at the end of Ashcroft Road) from Thursday to Sunday.

There's lots of bike racks, and it's just off the canal, so you can get there pleasantly and traffic-free. It therefore joins the growing list of bike-friendly cafes in London, which are appearing faster than TfL press releases these days. So if you miss it, don't worry, there'll be another one along in a minute.

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Taxi complaint? Try hailing the Met

In the Chinese astrological cycling system, 2009 was the Year of Being Cut Up By Buses, and 2010 is the Year of Being Cut Up By Taxis.

(2008 was White Vans, 2011 will be Motorbike Couriers, and 2012 Deadline-Chasing Olympic Construction Vehicles.)

The email for bus complaints is CUSTOMERSERVICES.BUSES@tfl.gov.uk. After two or three weeks you get a mostly standard reply saying we take this very seriously, the driver has been interviewed dah di dah.

It's easy to mock, but it does work, because two days later when you get cut up in the same way by the same bus route at the same junction at Trafalgar Square at the same time of day, it's a different driver.

Of course, the vast majority of cabbies are hard working, drive sensibly and safely, and I have no problem with them. They deserve respect: it takes a great deal of skill to negotiate your way through London's labyrinthine roadmap while texting your bookie and telling your fare how Nigel Farage should be running the country. It's only the tiny minority that are abusive, swivel-eyed bullies bent on intimidation. Say only five per cent of the 21,000 licensed black-cab drivers in London, in other words only... oh, actually that's over a thousand.

Anyway, one email line of complaint for taxis is Taxi.Complaints@pco.org.uk. However, they're only really concerned with licensing ('The Public Carriage Office has no legislative power to investigate road traffic offences committed by cab drivers'). You get the idea they're more concerned if the licence plate is displayed in the wrong font than if the driver ran you off the road to impress the hen party in the back.

But I see from my colleague Danny at City Cyclists that he's had some success by reporting bad black-cab driving to our friends in the Met at https://secure.met.police.uk/roadsafelondon/. No, really - and this was a genuine being-cut-up road traffic incident, not some outright very-serious offence such as taking a photograph of a pothole. I'll try emailing it next time I have to dodge a missile-taxi sequestering my ASL on a red in Whitehall.

Green light for red-light jumping on lethal London Road

Here's another example where a cyclist is much safer jumping the red lights. It's London Road, which runs northwest from the howdah riders of the Elephant and Castle to the trapeze artists and clowns of St George's Circus.

The pic right shows the view looking south towards the Elephant. The cyclist has just jumped a red light. And he's quite right to do so.


Here's why. Going north (right), from the lights, the left-hand lane is buses and cycles only. The rest of the road carries two lanes of oncoming regular traffic.

So what happens if you obediently wait for the green before setting off? You probably have a bus on your tail. And, unfortunately, not all the drivers are patient enough to wait for safety before overtaking you.


Many buses, perhaps finding the oncoming traffic is oncoming faster than they expected, cut in lethally close as they overtake you at high speed (right). Riding assertively, in the middle of the lane, is no use; it only makes drivers more impatient and more liable to overtake dangerously. Roughly speaking, I'd say that if you obey the lights, you get cut up between one in ten times, and five in ten times, depending on how fast a cyclist you are.

We had a very unpleasant such incident on Monday night. A near-death experience. A brush with mortality and a bus's boundary layer. I glimpsed my doppelgänger, riding a ghostly bike identical to mine, and he looked just like me, only older. It wasn't nice at all. And what did the driver have to say for himself? 'I dunno what you're talking about', before slamming the window shut. Anyway, the matter is currently in the hands of Transport for London's email profanity filter.

A few days ago I covered the new cycle lane at the north end of Blackfriars Bridge, whose only effect is to stop cyclists while giving no safety benefit. No wonder cyclists ignore the red there. (TfL haven't done anything about it yet, though they say they're aware and that the current signal phasing is only a temporary measure. Yeah, well, the Eiffel Tower was only a temporary measure in 1889.) But busting a red there is a matter of bypassing stupidity and inconvenience. Busting the red here, on London Road, is actually a safety benefit: you can put a safe distance between you and the assassin driving the wheeled office block behind you.

As it happens, I always stop at reds. Always. It's a sort of pride-cum-PR thing: I have a superiority complex as a cyclist, and want to show that I'm better than those idiot drivers who ignore ASLs and push their luck at the lights.

But my advice for anyone cycling this stretch is, for your own safety, to ignore the reds (if safe to do so, of course). I won't. But in this case you should do as I say, not do as I do.

Naughty bus

Bus, NO.

BAD bus.

Bus get back behind ASL this minute.

Naughty bus.

Bus go back to garage with NO petrol for supper.

(Waterloo Bridge this morning - bus not just encroaching on ASL, but invading it, colonising it, rigging elections, installing puppet rulers, and stripping it of all its natural resources. Bad, bad bus.)

Bus vs bike? One loser, one winner

Bikes are the fastest way to get across cities, especially central London. We all know that.

It causes problems at rendezvous with friends who are taking public transport though. Invariably I'm ten minutes early and they're half an hour late.

Which makes me look the no-mates drinking by himself at the bar. Or the restaurant loser stood up by an internet date. Or the middle-aged newlywed whose Russian bride has yet to return from picking up her new British passport.

Anyway, yesterday we performed an accidental bus/cycle comparison. Two of us took a parallel journey from the Elephant and Castle to the top of Regent St at rush hour, setting off at the same time (8.33am), taking identical routes (over Westminster Bridge and past Trafalgar Square).

Of course, the bike won comfortably: I arrived at 8.47am, my colleague at 9.05am. The bike journey, in other words, took less than half the time (14 versus 32 minutes).

The cost difference is also dramatic. The bus journey was a peak-time Oyster card charge of £1*. The bike expense on the day was nothing. Plus six quid for a coffee and sandwich while I kicked my heels waiting for them.

Still, I did my good deed for the day while I did so, explaining to a young Russian woman how to get to Heathrow. She seemed in quite a hurry.

(*Amended - see Tom's comment below)