I COULD not agree more with Bob Barnett (Gazette, Letters, April 29) regarding the "idiotic" bus station.

Was it perhaps designed by a group of chimpanzees doing their work experience?

May I add a plea: please pity and understand the drivers.

When passengers are standing moaning about late buses and watching the snarling melee of traffic, they should take a look at drivers who are also waiting about.

They have to:

  • To carry all their possessions and work items in huge and heavy backpacks all day, having lost their canteen and everything else in Queen Street,
  • use the public lavatories in knowledge everyone on the bus is timing them,
  • get their snacks from vending machines in a room behind Queen Street bus office, if they get time to walk there. Fine food for a working man or woman, especially in winter,
  • Sit cramped in a tiny cab in cold weather or heatwave alike,
  • deal with screaming children, abusive drunks, complaining passengers and people who pay with £20 notes,
  • arrive back at the bus station to find the street jammed with traffic.

You find it tedious? They do it all day.

These people are simply trying to do their jobs and I never cease from marvelling that the majority do it so very well.

These people are tired, some work more than nine hours a day.

Their reward? To be made the scapegoats for councils becoming known as the worst in England.

Tin elephants? Using money to travel to London Liverpool Street station dressed as Romans?

The Victorian principle of "give the voters buns and circuses to keep them quiet" is long gone.

David Morton

Rowhedge