Next on Boris Johnson's 'bendy' bus hit list is the 38 which runs through Dalston: http://tinyurl.com/l45hyb

Good they are a menace. I saw three 38's in a row on Albion Road taking up 180ft of road and all three were nearly empty

Bendy buses work well as nightbuses, as there is plenty of room to stand on them and night buses are always busy. I like the 149 at night, back to Dalston from Shoreditch.

On double decker night buses someone always falls down the stairs.

The route or the bus?

I was recently speaking to a bus driver about this. In short, he told me that routemasters can hold less than half the capacity of the bendy bus. So if we had routemasters, we'd need double the number of buses, double the engineers, double maintenance costs etc... And they're slower, too.

Boris won the election on this issue (well... that and voter apathy). And like every bus driver, he knows that it's a bad idea to scrap bendy buses. But he can't back out now, even though it's going to be a ridiculous waste of public funds to scrap them and replace them with something that requires double the costs to run. At the end of the day, fares will just have to be hiked up even further.

On a related note, here's an interesting conspiracy theory from my bus driving friend: taxis are apparently the natural enemy of the bus. And I'm told that taxi drivers are a very influential source for the London upper middle classes - they can vent their anger about buses to their passengers. This, I'm told, is the source of hatred for bendy buses. My friend even went as far as to say that taxi drivers colluded to persuade editors and journalists to write / shoot anti-bendy bus opinion features to support their cause.

Oh, and if Boris is thinking of scrapping the route, he's lost the plot. We don't have many bus routes that take us into the heart of the West End. The 243 and the 242 go so far, if you live in the right parts of Dalston, but the 38 is a main artery for Dalstonites.

I don't think they would scrap the route. It's too good.

I think I might believe the conspiracy theory you know. It is strange where the huge hatred for bendy's come from. It's got to be taxi drivers!

When ever there is an accident with a cyclist, bendy buses are always automatically blamed - even though it's usually nothing to do with them, it's a HGV!