Wayne has had better support whilst travelling on public transport. Come on TFL!
Speaker 1: And yeah we’re on. So Wayne take it away.
Wayne: Okay, yeah. Last week I went out with one of the neighbours here and I think he’s just younger than me, and he’s been disabled since birth due to oxygen starvation and he has physical, mental and emotional issues and most of the time people tend to, like avoid him. So I try to go out with him every once in a while. Which is fun but it does, it is quite hard work for me, but anyway he wanted to go all the way down to Dover to go down in the tunnels and that, but that proved almost impossible to organise. So I said I’d take him to the Imperial War Museum in London and off we went and we had to go on a really round about train journey because he didn’t want to pay to go into London and back out because that’s different. Then, so I planned that we went all over the place and ended up at Brixton where we could get a simple tube to get there but when we get there, he finds out he doesn’t do tubes. We’d used my railcard, my disabled railcard to get that far and then was gonna use my companion bus pass to use the bus to get to the museum.
Anyway, wait ages for a bus. Big queue, gets on this bus. Lots of people on it. Bus driver refused to accept the pass. His explanation was ‘well I haven’t seen one of those.’ I tried to stay calm. Phil was getting rather anxious about me getting agitated and wanted to get off the bus. A woman behind him in the queue was trying to keep him on the bus and explain to the bus driver about bus passes. The bus driver was getting was shirky with her and saying ‘it’s nothing to do with you, you just step aside, I want these to get off.’ I refused to get off, he said he’d call the police. I said yeah, go for it. I want the police but he wouldn’t have it, and he kept saying ‘well let me explain to you again. I’ve not seen one of those. So how do I know it’s real?’ Being Wayne and getting chirpy but trying to stay calm, I said; how do you know you got oxygen in the air then, can you see it?’
He got very upset about that one and I said ‘look I’m disabled, this is a companion pass.’
He said ‘yeah I’ve only got your word for that.’ At the time I was wearing my lanyard anyway. So there’s evidence about the things. Plus I got the bus pass. I refused to get off. By now half the people that were in a hurry had got off the bus. So eventually rather than calling the police he called his Supervisor who basically told him he was being stupid and to let us on and that was that and I couldn’t understand why did there have to be so much fuss? [Laughing]
I just couldn’t believe that, that he wouldn’t let either of us on because he had not seen a disabled bus pass. Well transport for London desperately need some kind of education then in [inaudible] because that must be affecting literally millions of people that visit from all over the country.
That’s the end of my whinge.
