Why buses arrive in twos
Wait long enough at a STOP and two buses will turn up together. It is not bad luck, and it is not the DRIVER's fault. If a bus runs slightly late, more PASSENGERs have gathered by the time it reaches each STOP, so it spends longer picking them up and falls further behind. Meanwhile the bus behind arrives at stops that were just emptied, sails through, and gradually catches up.
Transport planners call it bunching, and once it starts it feeds itself. They fight it by holding early buses at timing points, sending one ahead empty to reset the gap, or running the ROUTE so often that nobody bothers looking at the TIMETABLE in the first place.
The yellow was decided at a meeting
American SCHOOL buses are all the same colour because of a conference in 1939. An educator called Frank Cyr brought experts together to agree standards for school transport, and among other things they picked a yellow-orange paint — now officially named national school bus glossy yellow — chosen because it catches the eye in the half-light of early morning and makes black lettering easy to read against it.
London's buses are red for a much less scientific reason. In the early 1900s one bus company painted its fleet red so passengers could spot it among the competition, that company ended up dominating the city, and the colour simply stayed.
Two floors, one narrow street
The DOUBLE DECKER exists because British streets are old and narrow. You cannot make the bus much longer, so you make it taller: one carries around seventy-five people while taking up the road space of a single-decker holding forty.
Everything about it is designed against tipping over. The ENGINE, gearbox and fuel tank sit as low as possible, the upper deck is built from lighter materials, and every design must pass a tilt test in which the whole bus is jacked over to 28 degrees without falling. The staircase sits at the front where the DRIVER can see it, and the HANDRAIL runs everywhere, because most injuries on buses happen to people who stand up before the bus has stopped.
The bus you could jump onto
London's old Routemaster had no DOORS at the back at all, just an open platform and a pole. Passengers hopped on and off wherever the bus slowed down, and a CONDUCTOR walked the AISLE selling tickets while the driver drove. Regulars loved it.
It vanished from normal service in 2005, and the reason was not nostalgia but steps. Anyone using a wheelchair, or pushing a buggy, or unsteady on their feet, simply could not get aboard. Modern low-floor buses have no step at the door and can kneel towards the kerb, which is less romantic and a great deal fairer.
The cheapest way to move a city
A bus lane costs a fraction of a tram line and almost nothing next to an underground railway, and it can be painted somewhere else when the city changes shape. That is why the BUS is the workhorse of public transport nearly everywhere.
Some cities have pushed the idea a long way. Bus rapid transit, first built in Curitiba in Brazil in the 1970s, gives buses their own road and raised stations where you buy a TICKET before boarding, then load through every door at once. A bus stops for seconds instead of minutes, and the route moves people at rates approaching an underground line for a tiny share of the price.