Tom Kearney is backing bus drivers

A BUS safety campaigner who was catapulted into a coma after being run over returned to the spot he was hit to support drivers’ calls to “end Transport for London’s safety scandal”.

Tom Kearney criticised London’s mayor Sir Sadiq Khan for failing to get on top of alarming figures showing three people are hospitalised by a London bus every day.

There are, on average, 90 crashes, each day for the past five years, and deaths caused by buses are at the highest they have ever been, according to TfL statistics.

Meanwhile, drivers with pee bottles in their pockets spoke to the Extra about lack of public toilets and dangerous pressures they were being put under to arrive on time due to contracts with the private sector. A protest, organised by the GMB union, which is promoting a Bus Driver Bill of Rights, is warning staff are stressed, tired, and underpaid.

TfL statistics show over 141 people have been killed in preventable bus safety incidents in the capital since Mr Kearney was hit by a No 73 in Ox- ford Street in 2009. He said: “When I first came out of the coma, I couldn’t eat for weeks, but I wanted to start researching. I come from mining and heavy industry. I have sat on boards of companies, I have been a director. I have sat through fatality hearings. I know the obligations of people that run dangerous operations, what their obligations are to the public and the workers.

“I was shocked to see that TfL did not publish a single stitch of data about the number of people seriously injured and killed by buses. Zero information. I thought this was insane.”

Protesters are calling for a ‘Bus Driver Bill of Rights’

Mr Kearney, from Hampstead, began petitioning politicians from all parties and sending multiple FOI, freedom of information, requests until TfL caved in and began to publish the data in 2014.

He said: “Now they are the only local transport authority in the world that publishes this data. That’s because of me. We have over 10 years’ now and the data is astounding. Three people hospitalised every single day, that’s the average. The number of people killed each year is the highest it has ever been.”

But the culture of safety at TfL has not gone far enough, said the campaigner.

“The contracts with private firms are based on time metrics,” he added. “If you are travelling on a shared path, with bicycles and pedestrians, and your sole metric is timelines, then you are going to have problems.”

Mr Kearney said he had been involved in steering potential legislative am­endments currently being assessed in parliament. “It’s a beautiful afternoon. I would love to not be here, but this is an institutionally unsafe bus operation and something has got to be done about it.”

TfL said it was committed to learning from every collision as part of a “Vision Zero” goal to eliminate death and serious injury on the network by 2041, and ensuring that “no one will be killed in, or by, a London bus by 2030”.

Lorna Murphy, TfL’s director of buses, said: “Alongside bus operators, we take safety and welfare seriously. We are working alongside all bus operators, manufacturers and the boroughs to make the network safer through our comprehensive and world-leading bus safety programme. This is delivering major safety improvements across our fleet, our roads and the wider bus network. We are committed to ensuring that all staff have a fair work schedule, with safe vehicles and access to the facilities they need, and contracts rightly require operators to meet high standards. We value all feedback from the thousands of people who work tirelessly to keep London’s bus network moving and will carefully consider any proposals for improvements to safety and welfare.”

Drivers: ‘We have to pee in the cabs’

BUS drivers carrying pee bottles in their cabs due to the lack of public loos and rest areas feel they are under intense pressure to meet “la-la land” scheduling set by private contractors.

One told the Extra how they spent “most of my time out of work in bed, knackered and quite depressed”.

“They don’t want to pay the money for the younger guys who can hold their pee,” they said. “I have to have a coffee if I get fatigued. If I do, where do I use the toilet? You can either stop the bus, and get refused to use the toilet.

“That’s the way the world is at the moment.

“We are tired we are stressed. We are pissing in the cabs. We are pissing in bottles.

“It is also an exploitation of what is mainly an elderly immigrant workforce.”

The driver added: “You have got this toxic equation of overly fast qualification for new drivers, ever-diminishing number of buses, and higher loading because there are less buses that have to run faster.”

There was “a productivity pressure” due to the last 40 years of privatisation.

“We’re told we should never speed, but if you are told to maintain the five bar headway at any time, you are going to get drivers speeding and misbehaving.”