Chapter 1: Buses and the city

Why are buses so important? ‘A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself travelling on a bus can count himself a failure’ is a quote often ascribed to Margaret Thatcher, but with no verifiable source. Perhaps it owes its life as an apocryphal axiom to the thought that it sums up a very common view of the bus system and its users – one often held by people who do not use buses rather than those who do. That it is no more true than any other simplistic generalisation of a group of the travelling public, does not limit its compelling premise – or the more insidious logic that flows from it, that as a consequence it is not worth making the bus system effective, just to make it as cheap as possible and to minimise as far as possible its burden on the rest of society.