FixMyTransport Journal

If you’ve tried to travel with a dog, you’ll be aware that bus drivers sometimes take exception to canine passengers.  It’s a problem that crops up regularly on FixMyTransport* – see these reports, for example:

• ‘When we tried to get on with two small whippets he refused us entry’.
• Holland Park bus driver ‘allergic’ to dogs
• ‘Never had any problems until […] my dog was refused.’
• ‘I don’t like dogs, and that is not coming on my bus.’

We’re sure dogs can be a pain for bus drivers – but to be quite honest, they haven’t seen the half of it. Just for fun, we took a quick look through Flickr’s Creative Commons, where, we have to say, dogs are the thin end of the wedge.

We’d love to see how the transport providers of the UK would cope with these passengers… and we await our first ‘duck on the bus’ report with anticipation.

Image: Duck on the Bus by Todd Mecklem

Unusual passenger on a bus in Portland, Oregon. He looks happy enough… although it is hard to tell if it’s actually a stuffed duck.

Image: Cat on Bus by Andrew Bulhak

This fellow is apparently Bob, the same cat who achieved some notoriety by riding the Tube. And here he is on the bus. Doing something that would definitely get a human passenger thrown off.

Image: Ethiopian Cargo Service by Evgeni Zotov

Sheep on the roof? Can’t see it on the number 37 bus to Clapham, but in some parts of the world it’s absolutely standard.

Image: Parrot on a Bus by Claire Taylor

Pesky birds! They’ll travel on the bus if you let them… and if you don’t they’ll find a way, anyway:

Image: Hitchhiker by John Sullivan

Image: A Visitor by Joachim Probst

You know what? Dogs seem pretty innocuous when compared to a camel trying to board the bus. Maybe this is an image to print out, carry in your wallet, and show to the driver next time they try to stop Rover from boarding.

*As you can see from the operators’ replies to these complaints, the regulations about the carriage of animals vary from company to company. Dogs will generally not be carried if they are dirty, threatening or annoying to other passengers, or roaming free – but these are all down to the driver’s discretion.

TfL’s guidelines, for example, are here. Rather magnificently, they include the line ‘dogs must be carried on the escalator’, the basis of one of this country’s corniest jokes.

Top image credit: Michael Jung