Here comes the four-week lesson

摘要

The public perception of a bus driver seems to be that if you can drive a car then you can be put in charge of a passenger-carrying vehicle. To those of us in the know, that is far from the truth. To find out how driver training is changing, we called into First Somerset & Avon's Weston Island depot in Bath, where a six-month trial is underway of a new training regime that the Driving Standards Agency might adopt as the possible model for the future. On the day of my visit, it is a busy place indeed with anxious trainees waiting to be examined and newer recruits watching in anticipation, knowing that in a few weeks' time they will be put under the same pressure. Driver trainer Andy Griffin explains that the former three-week course could universally be consigned to history if the experimental four-week one is deemed a success. He tells me he joined the company in 1985 when it was still Bristol Omnibus and found himself driving Bristol BEs and VRs, later Leyland Lynxes.