According to Fabien Courtellemont, Arriva’s commercial director, their buses include “contact sensors that prevent doors from closing on a passenger but instead reopen automatically and a system preventing buses from moving with open doors” (The Times, January 5).
If this is true, a good number of their buses need to be serviced as I have been in many a bus (both normal and bendy) moving with open doors, with commuters occasionally drawing the driver’s attention. As to doors closing on passengers, this happened several times, including on myself and a woman with a pushchair. Also, if Arriva takes safety “extremely seriously”, why is it that some of the bendy buses I happen to board have a spanner icon displayed on one of their screens, which indicates that the vehicle needs to be serviced? Only this morning, while paying the driver on Bus 207, I spotted this spanner icon clearly displayed on a green monitor.