The bendy bus that grated a man to death

It is hard to imagine what it must have been like to be Lee Beckwith, the 21-year-old from Brentwood who got trapped under a bendy bus on Tuesday and was grated to death like a piece of cheese.

But it is all too easy for any bendy bus user to understand what was, for me, the even greater horror. The driver and passengers on that bus had a man dying under their feet for nine minutes, dragged him for more than a mile, and they didn't even know.

After it had finally ejected Mr Beckwith's broken body on to the road, the bus went on its way. The driver didn't find out what had happened until he was drinking his tea back at the depot.

That bus driver, God help him, may now be pulled apart in a kind of judicial version of what happened to Lee Beckwith. Perhaps he deserves to be; perhaps not. But the fact is that if he'd been driving any other kind of London bus, he simply couldn't have failed to notice a trapped passenger. The broader responsibility for Beckwith's death lies not with the hapless driver but with the rather better-paid people who put him at the wheel of a vehicle that many believe is unsafe.

Lee Beckwith's mother, say relatives, is so upset that she has not said a single word since hearing the news. When she recovers the power of speech, she might consider sueing the Mayor, and his transport commissioner, Peter Hendy, because they have known for months the damning statistics that this newspaper reported in June.

According to figures slipped out to the London Assembly by TfL itself, bendy buses cause 5.6 pedestrian injuries per million miles operated, compared with

2.6 per million for all other buses. They are involved in 2.62 collisions with cyclists per million miles, compared with only 0.97 per million for all other buses. And they have 153 accidents per million miles, compared with only 87 per million on non-bendy routes.

Bendy buses had 1,751 accidents in the year to April. That is an average of nearly five a day - and more than five accidents a year for every single bendy in the fleet. They injured 90 people, some very seriously, such as a man at Victoria who lost both legs. They also catch fire.

Worst of all, Beckwith was the third Londoner to be killed by a bendy bus in 10 months. Although there are only 350 bendies in the whole of London - around five per cent of the bus fleet - they are responsible for nearly 20 per cent of bus-related deaths. (Even the old Routemasters, with their open platform from which people occasionally fell, were safer.)

These are figures that no responsible administration can ignore; but TfL has ignored them. It argues that bendies crash more often because they "run on busier routes" and "encounter more pedestrians". This is denial gone berserk. The vast majority of buses on London's busiest streets are not bendies. Even if traffic is heavier on bendy-served roads, which I doubt, that simply cannot account for such colossal differences in accident rates.

Bendies "encounter" (hit) more pedestrians because in a Victorian city like London they are too big for the available roadspace. They "encounter" more pedestrians because the driver cannot see the back of his vehicle when it goes round a corner. Only yesterday, TfL told this newspaper that the buses have an "excellent" safety record.

And all that's before we've even started on the other ways in which bendy buses blight London. Grotesquely higher fare evasion, which costs us all millions of pounds a year; higher anti-social behaviour and crime (one Ealing Labour MP says the back seats of bendy buses in his area are "like Beirut"); drastically reduced seating and Tube-like crushes of standees ( when the 73 route went from Routemasters to bendies, the number of peak-hour seats halved overnight.)

Mr Livingstone is proud of his buses, which he still considers his great achievement. But the buses show the weaknessesas well as the strengths, of his rule. Yes, usage has risen - by around 5.2 per cent a year, on average - since the Mayor came in. But what most people don't realise is that bus use was rising, on average, by almost as much each year before Ken ever got his hands on the network, and for an absolute fraction of the unsustainable fortunes now splurged in subsidy.

Yes, there are more, and more modern, buses on the streets. But in contrast to, say, the Routemaster, which was painstakingly designed for London and a pleasure to ride in, the new vehicles, bendies especially, symbolise the decay of our public-service ethos. With their inadequate numbers of hard seats (some facing backwards), their hopeless sightlines, their lack of ventilation, their lumbering unsuitability for our streets, their gangs of freeloading teenagers, and their sometimes careless, aggressive drivers, one marvels how Ken can have spent so much yet achieved such startling reductions in quality.

Nor are the bendies just a transport failure. They sum up the negatives of Mr Livingstone's rule: the casual breach of political pledges (remember "I will save the Routemaster?"), the contempt for the wishes of Londoners and the preference for often half-baked technocratic solutions over human solutions.

London's buses are not unsuccessful, but they are now somehow deeply unlikeable. The old, human, public transport network, designed for people and symbolised by the bus conductor, has been destroyed. The new antihuman transport network, designed for bureaucrats with boxes to tick, can be no better symbolised than by the bus which sliced up a human being without anyone even noticing.