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According to one witness, the road surface was covered in a trail of blood. The victim's boots and pieces of his clothing were scattered along the carriageway. Another account said he was screaming.
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.
Reader views (12)
I knew Lee's dad Paul more than I knew Lee and Paul would constantly talk about how proud he was of his son and the acheivements he had made in his short life. I really do feel for everyone that knew Lee.
One thing I would like to say is to Paul who made the comment about articulated lorries! yes everyone has accidents and some are not that lucky to make it through but the end of the day the bendy busses are very dangerous and yes they should not be allowed on the roads. I just hope that something like this doesn't happen to you because i can guarantee that you will not be saying that!
- Kellie, Essex
I find Paul of London's comments rather amusing.
At what point in the article does the editor try to state that bendy buses are more of an issue because we are British? The argument is quite clear, bendy buses import more danger to the road transport system. I am sure this risk is present in other countries too and not some unique element of our British personalities you are so quick to draw attention to. I suggest you try cycling around these things for a time and see how close you come to being squashed into a corner by one of these overtaking you.
- Bryan Donnelly, London
Everyone who knew him has suffered a great loss and trying to place blame won't bring him back but surely someone on the bus would have noticed something.
My condolences to his family. I just hope they tell his baby how wonderful its dad was.
- Emma, Brentwood, Essex
Any accidental death is sad.
Let's face it. Bendy buses are hardly a new concept. I can remember first travelling on them in France back in 1981. They're used all over the world, so why is it that the British seem incapable of operating them without some people having an attack of the vapours?
Articulated lorries cause similar deaths, but I don't see a campaign against them.
- Paul, London
I think that the Routemasters should be reinstated, and the bendy buses (bendybi?) should be rapidly retired on safety grounds.
- Sarah Andrews, Woking, Surrey
Well said, sums up everything about these horrible punishment cells on wheels. Though you have to appreciate Ken's oblique sense of humour, the man who killed the Routemaster gave us this bus in its place. Yet another thing to remember at the next mayoral elections.
- Sarah N., London
The other thing that bendy bus drivers seem incapable of is observing the rules of yellow box junctions - not surprising when they have to have 18 metres (60 feet?) of clear space on the other side of a junction before entering it. It's just not going to happen in London, is it? So they end up blocking junctions and bringing traffic to a standstill... which is ironic really as getting more people to use buses was supposed to reduce congestion, wasn't it?
- Keith Cowan, London
This news has haunted me ever since I heard it and my heart goes out to Lee's family and friends.
- Vas, Ilford, Essex
I loved the Routemasters. The bendy 73 has made me claustrophobic. Horrible, horrible buses.
I don't suppose they will ever bring back the Routemasters, very sad.
- James Mcquat, London
I whole heartedly agree with Andrew's views.
It seems ironic this tragic accident came just a few days after Boris Johnson promished to the Conservative Party conference that if he were to be elected mayor he would see to their withdrawal.
I forget the reason for their being taken out of service, but during the late 1970s in Sheffield South Yorshire PTE operated five MAN versions. They ended with the National Bus Company where it seemed like 'pass the parcel' as to who would operate them - I believe they ended their lives in Oxford. So it is obvious their use had been tried before, and not to any great success. Articulated buses are a European convention, not British. We have, and should always will, rely on the double decker for high capacity vehicles.
- Derek Allen, Stourport-on-Severn, Worcs
Unfortunately it takes a 'big man' to admit that he's wrong and Ken is not such a man.
Having lived on Route 73 for 10 years now, the journey has become a nightmare since the Bendies were introduced. We now have a less-frequent service, less seats, more aggressive/ troublesome passengers, greater fair-evasion, and drivers who appear incapable of accelerating or deccelerating smoothly. Not to mention the number of times I've seen them close the bus doors trapping someone in them.
Yes passenger numbers on the route have increased. But it's not due to people choosing this over using the car. Rather it is due to the huge numbers of Poles and other East-Europeans using it.
Bendies seem like a tarted-up version of Cuba's infamous 'Camel' buses. Though I don't believe they suffer from 'instantaneous bus combustion' like the bendies.
- Sean, London
I regulary use route 436 and have felt bumps where buses hit other vehicles. When the other driver has managed to get the bus to stop the bus drivers deny everything. Of course they do, they don't know what's happening 18 metres away from where they sit. And what car /van driver is going to stop a bus of of around 120 pessangers just because its had the mirror smashed? They are a death trip both on the bus and on the pavement - have you ever tried getting off a full one at a stop where not many people get off nobody wants to move.
- Sue Chant, London
