Are London buses getting more dangerous?

Out-oF-control careering and vehicles that shoot off suddenly it’s not ideal

- Ross Lydall

London’s transport commissioner, Andy Lord, was not having a good day. Appearing at City Hall for a question-and-answer session recently, he began in chipper mood, saying he was looking forward to a “momentous year” for Transport for London as it celebrated its 25th anniversary.

It started to go wrong when the issue of pedestrian road deaths arose. It got worse when the questions focused on bus fatalities.

In July 2018, two years after becoming mayor, Sadiq Khan launched his Vision Zero plan “to eliminate deaths and serious injuries from London’s transport network” by 2041. At the time, much of the focus was on cyclist deaths, but the Mayor’s plan also included the interim target of “no one being killed on or by a bus by 2030”.

Now, almost seven years on, campaigners and a new generation of survivors and bereaved are asking: what has been achieved?

Transport data is focused on a morbid indicator known as KSIs — killed or seriously injured. The brutal facts are these: in 2017 in London, 259 people were killed or seriously injured in or by a bus. By 2023 the annual tally had fallen by just one, to 258.

The number injured or killed on board a bus increased from 105 to 121. The number of pedestrians injured or killed by a bus fell from 99 to 86.

Thankfully, the number of deaths is a small proportion of the KSI total — eight in 2017, six in 2023 (though rising to 16 in 2024). But the fatalities tend to be just the “tip of the iceberg” and can mask a multitude of life-changing collisions, where chance and medical intervention can be the difference between life and death.