Unscheduled bus stop



As usual I had my nose buried in a book on the bus to work this morning and it took me a few minutes to realise that the bus hadn't actually moved for a while. Look up - hmmm, doesn't look good, all I can see are the roofs of other stationery buses. Several minutes go past and nothing moves; infuriatingly I am less than a a third of the way to work. Assuming the endless roadworks that have been screwing things up so often are in play once more I give up, get off this bus and find a pile of exasperated folks doing the same from a score of other trapped buses, start walking. By the time I reached the West End of Princes Street I realised that the traffic backed up to Haymarket I was stuck in was just one part of the jam - there was a bunch of fire engines and a hydraulic lift working on a crunched double decker right at a major junction, so in four different directions everything was stuffed (and of course I felt a bit guilty for cursing road works etc when it was actually an accident).

It turned out that the bus at the back of this pic I snapped as I walked past (the one with the crane arm above it) had been hit by a truck carrying a crane which had ripped right through the roof just two or three minutes before - couple of minutes later and it could have been the bus I was on; scary how quickly and simply the everyday trip can turn into an accident. Some people were injured, but fortunately no-one was killed; the fire brigade used the hydraulic lift to rescue some injured folks rather than trying to get them down the narrow bus stairs. I walked most of the way to work, my thinking now changed from "I left earlier than usual to get a good start for this, dammit???" to "gee, it is a lovely sunny morning and I ain't been harmed in an accident, life is actually good and hey, it was a nice morning for a walk anyway, eh?".