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26th June - Arriva Accessibility Issues

And driver discrimination.

Posted On 4 Jul 2022, 9:14 p.m.
Updated On 11 Jul 2022, 12:11 p.m.

By Synth9617

Initially written Monday 4th July.

On Sunday June 26th, 2022, we travelled to Reading for the Reading Buses Open Day on Arriva Midlands & the Shires’ route 800.

The journey to Reading was fine but could have been better. The ramp onto the bus had a poor transition into the saloon floor making it difficult to get the wheelchair on the bus. Arriva’s Mercedes Citaro buses, specifically those with the registration plate starting in either BD12D or BJ12Y, have the wheelchair bay call bell on the window rail, no cushioned backrest, and the normally vertical pole which acted as point to push the chair against, being replaced by an inadequate “frame” that ended up making the already limited aisle space even more limited and made it harder to manoeuvre the wheelchair into the bay.

The wheelchair bay only had two seats worth of space as opposed to the normal three seats worth of space, which meant that I had to sit on the edge one of the priority seats to put my foot in the way of the wheelchair to prevent it sliding. I am quite tall at 6 foot 3 but my legs could barely reach the chair even when I was barely on the actual chair.

However, the journey home was where the major problems started. Aside from having a vehicle from the same order batch as the morning trip, the sounder on this bus was faulty and therefore the only indication of a bell being pressed was the stop sign, which had been moved to make way for the now disused, next-stop display from this vehicle’s previous life. So far, not ideal but also these things happen.

Then, I glanced down to the wheelchair bell button. Except, it wasn’t a push button but a capacitive button meaning it was a touch sensor like a smartphone screen, they also didn’t think to put any haptic feed-back in it so that it lets the user, who is most likely facing away from the normal sign due to its location, know when it’s been pressed without relying on some small lights on the button. They did however put braille around it presumably saying “STOP” or something along those lines as I do not know how to read braille.

Picture of the Capactive Wheelchair Call Bell on the buses.

Upon pulling into the bus station, we allowed the other passengers to alight the bus before us as we would take some time and used this opportunity to inform the driver of the vehicle that the sounder did not work, and that the wheelchair call bell is not fit for purpose as a blind user would not know its registered their press. To which the driver replied with “It shows up on my dash anyway, so it is fine. It is not like blind individuals or wheelchair-bound users go out alone” which immediately annoyed both me and Victoria.

We then proceeded to get off the bus before it escalated and make our way home. Except our bus home on our local route was also one of these Mercedes 12-plates. So, we went with our plan B, a bus to the main road a bit further away from our home but is served by Carousel Buses, who are part of the Go-Ahead Group. Thankfully, there was a bus to that stop waiting, specifically Mercedes Citaro BT09GOP which used to be a dual-door vehicle based in London under the London General brand, also Go-Ahead Group. Boarding was much easier than the newer Arriva versions of the same vehicle, driven by a polite driver and had an entirely different sounding wheelchair bay bell to the normal stopping bell on Citaros which normally does not happen very often with these.

We posted on our individual Twitter accounts about this, tagging the ‘Arriva Beds & Bucks’ Twitter account in each post, to which we had no reply. Then the charity ‘Bus Users UK’ retweeted Victoria’s post while saying that it was both “bizarre and completely unacceptable” and that if Arriva do not give a satisfactory response, we can escalate it through them.








This suddenly got the Arriva Twitter account to notice the issue where they then asked for our reference number, to which we informed them we had just called and that the depots had been informed. This was then followed up by them hoping “this does not deter you from travelling with us in the future”. Which, as this is not the first time we have had issues using a wheelchair on their services, be it train or bus, we intend to avoid Arriva as much as possible.



On Monday June 27th, 2022, we called Arriva Customer Support, and spoke to them, video below, and the depots with the vehicles supposedly informed, along with the High Wycombe depot supposedly informed of the driver’s comment.



To read about this incident from Victoria's perspective visit https://victoriaclairet.wixsite.com/mysite/post/arriva-disability-access-and-training-issues


^Chris

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