In the unlikely event you’re one of the tiny minority of Londoners to whom the type of bus operated on a small number of central routes actually matters enough to you that you agree that most of a Mayoral election campaign should be focussed on it, read on.

Channel 4’s FactCheck have had a look at one of Boris’s manifesto claims: “[Bendy buses] have twice as many collisions with pedestrians and cyclists than other buses.”

Ignoring the grammatically incorrect ’than’ (what did all those school fees buy?), you can certainly read some figures to suggest that this is true, which is why FactCheck give this claim a generous 50% accuracy score.

However, those figures compare bendy bus-operated routes against every other bus route in the entirety of London! This overlooks the obvious fact that bendy buses operate in central areas only, serving some of the most pedestrian-full streets in the city. Anyone who’s walked (or, I assume, driven) around central London will be familiar with how little attention many pedestrians pay to the red man signal and how prone they are to run out into the road to get to whatever exciting thing awaits them on the other side. Sheer volumes of pedestrians make these roads much riskier to operate any vehicle on.

When you compare bendy bus figures with a selection of non-bendy routes operating along similar roads in similar conditions, lo and behold, the figures become more or less identical (and certainly the difference is statistically insignificant, given the low overall numbers of accidents involving any types of buses).

And I’m delighted to see that those mischievous FactCheck researchers aren’t content to leave it at that, but instead deliver one final twist:

How do bendy buses score in contrast to accidents involving the old Routemaster?

Changes in routes mean that data isn’t directly comparable, but according to other figures TfL gave FactCheck, between January 1994 and September 2007 there were 0.05 fatalities per million km operated by bendy buses and 0.08 fatalities per million km operated by Routemasters.

For every dodgy use of statistics to support Boris’s bizarre obsession with abolishing bendy-buses, there’s an equally dodgy way to use statistics to prove his policies woefully misguided - hurrah!

This entry was posted on Saturday 22 March 2008 at 11.49 by Mr. Stop Boris and is filed under Buses, Channel 4, Media, Policies, Transport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS2 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.