"Public Transport, eh?"
I forgot to blog about this little incident I witnessed a few months ago. Basically the buses around Notting Hill had been diverted from their normal route (which is to go down Westbourne Park Road) to Westbourne Grove. This is a much narrower road, and so car parking had been banned on one side of the street. You can see both roads on this map, one at the top and one at the bottom. The junction of Westbourne Grove and Ledbury Road is where this story takes place.So what happened was one car ignored the parking ban. This car, in fact.
Essentially then the buses couldn't get past each other. Worse, because the junction was where bus routes crossed, they got stuck. In fact total gridlock ensued. These two pictures give you a flavour of how many buses were stuck - I think I could see at least 40 at one point in all four directions:
I don't know how the situation was resolved. I think there was a plan to get a tow-truck to remove the offending car (whose owner could not be found), but it couldn't get into the area to do that. At least an hour later the situation was just getting worse. Then as I was about to leave (yes, I had stood there watching for that length of time. Traffic lights changing can be quite interesting) a person walked past talking to his friend, beckoned to the line of buses and said in a derogatory tone, "public transport, eh".
posted by Matthew @ 9/17/2006 08:51:00 PM
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