After today I now firmly believe that all London busses should have auxiliary manual wheelchair ramps, of the kind dad used to use to load my powerchair into the back of our MPV. Of course, automatic bus ramps are wonderful, and I love being able to get on and off busses sleekly and quickly. Most of the time they work without a problem. However, when they don’t work there ought to be a backup system.

I went up to North Greenwich earlier today. Ironically enough I was heading for the TFL offices there to ask about a completely unrelated issue. The trip had started ordinarily enough: as usual I had caught the bus there. But when the time came for me to get off the bus, after the driver had let everyone else off first, the ramp stopped working. It would go out as normal, but then automatically shoot back in as though it had encountered something unexpected. Of course, this was not the first time I had seen this happen; the driver usually just has to reposition the bus slightly to get the ramp to stay out. But when he tried that, it still wouldn’t work. He tried over and over, but the ramp kept darting back in.

I must have been there for at least twenty minutes or half an hour, unable to get off the bus. In the end, the staff had to break the glass of a special compartment, in order to get to the emergency ramp tool. Yet it struck me that it would have just been been so much easier if somewhere on the bus, behind the driver’s cabin perhaps, there was an emergency manual ramp which the driver could get out, unfold and let me off the bus. Luckily busses terminate at North Greenwich, so nobody else was on the bus when this happened, and there were other TFL staff around. Yet I dread to think what things would have been like if the bus was on it’s way to somewhere, and a bus full of commuters was waiting for me to get off. As I say, automatic bus ramps are great, but experiences like this clearly demonstrate that there needs to be a back up.