The shaming death toll of Oxford Street’s buses

 
Buses on Oxford Street Picture: Jeremy Selwyn
Jeremy Selwyn
22 October 2012
WEST END FINAL

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With more than 200 million visitors per year, Oxford Street is Europe’s busiest shopping street. It is also London’s most dangerous.

As a direct result of TfL’s policy to run nearly 300 buses across it every hour, it has a pedestrian-vehicle collision rate 35 times the city average and suffers from London’s highest levels of ambient air pollution. Since 2006, there have been more than 300 bus-pedestrian accidents, in which at least 77 people have been killed or seriously injured

I would have breezed through such statistics too, until I became one of them. On 18 December 2009, I was struck in the head and chest by a bendy bus travelling at at least 20mph. Within seconds of impact, I lay in a deep coma.

As I lay asphyxiating in my own blood, Hamza Benkhadda, a 16-year-old from Hackney, ran to my assistance. Hamza had just received first aid training by participating in his school’s Duke of Edinburgh’s Awards Programme. Clearing blood from my nose and throat, he placed me in the recovery position and waited by my side until the arrival of the emergency services.

Then Mr Ian Sabin’s trauma team at the Royal London Hospital (RLH) spent the next month saving my life and brain. The RLH has a lot of practice doing this: it treats an average of three bus-pedestrian trauma victims per month (in fact, two other such victims lay with me in the ICU when I was there in 2009).

Because I owe my life to great Londoners like Hamza and Dr Sabin’s RLH team, I’d like to repay them by stopping others from having to experience my entirely preventable trauma.

I come from the mining industry: if I was director of a company in my sector with a casualty record as bad as Oxford Street, I would probably be in jail and my operation would have been closed long ago. TfL has been remarkably complacent in finding a solution to the “blight of buses” that Deputy Mayor Victoria Borwick and the New West End Company have both identified as threatening pedestrian safety and Oxford Street’s commercial success. If some clever solicitor would deign to review the Oxford Street massacre in the context of the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act of 2007, I’m confident that would inspire TfL’s highly-paid directors to find a solution pretty quick.

Mayor Boris Johnson can learn from his close friend Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City, whose recent pedestrianisation of Times Square and parts of Broadway are acclaimed by New Yorkers and visitors alike. Diverse European cities such as Berlin, Vienna, Lisbon, Dublin and even Istanbul offer compelling examples of vibrant commercial centres which are easy to get to on public transport and safe and enjoyable for pedestrians.

When people visit Oxford Street, their intention is to shop, work, visit friends or just enjoy some time in the greatest city on earth. It is not — like me in December 2009 — to lie on the street helpless, their brains and bodies crushed by crushing tonnes of steel. Pedestrianise Oxford Street, Boris: London deserves it.

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