Manchester Buses

Videoshow part 5: Bus Blocking

Manchester Buses reader Marek has been recording his experiences on Manchester's buses again.  This time, he's filmed an incident at Piccadilly Gardens in which a youth, annoyed at not being allowed on a Finglands 41 service, decided to block the bus from leaving.  A you can see, he succeeded in causing a bit of a scene.  It's never dull on the buses!  Thanks, Marek.

If you see anything interesting on the buses while you're out and about in Greater Manchester take a photo, video or audio recording and send it to us.

GMPTE's poster talks pork

It's understandable for people who work in public transport to think of faredodgers as lowlife scum, but would they go out and say it in public?  Apparently so.  James of the Virtual Nostril blog got in touch to let us know about this poster he spotted at a bus stop in Burnage.

In addition to 'Faredodger', 'Scally' and 'Criminal', this wordsearch also reveals that those who skip paying for transport are apparently 'pigs'!  This, of course, follows the recent controversy over the 'impossible cogs' poster.

Don't hold back on our account, GMPTE!

Recording a spot of bother on the buses

We've all been there.  Kids cause trouble upstairs on a bus and no-one does anything.  In these Conductor-free days the driver has enough on his or her plate without having to police the more anti-social types who frequent our buses.  We remember a full on physical assault taking place upstairs on a bus in Bradford during the 90s.  The other passengers either didn't notice or pretended not to.

Luckily though, sometimes someone's there to sort out the problem.  Manchester Buses reader Marek was on a Stagecoach 256 service from Flixton to Manchester recently.  Stuck in traffic, the bus was taking a long time to make its way down Portland Street.  Bored, some kids decided to start jumping up and down on the top deck, much to the annoyance of other passengers.  Luckily the driver was being trained and the trainer decided to sort them out with some good old Mancunian straight-talking.

Marek had his mobile phone to hand and recorded the exchange.  You can have a listen at http://vidocs.org/index.html?b=show&vidocs=7048534406

We're always interested to see and hear things you record on your Greater Manchester bus journeys.  So, next time something amusing happens while your traveling, why not record it and email us using the link in the left-hand column of the page?