Driving a car in treacherous conditions such as we saw this morning is difficult; so I imagine that driving a 12-Litre, 18-Metre, 23-Tonne bus must be very tricky indeed.
On the M30 bus from Town Hall station to Mosman, I usually get one of about 6 drivers. James, Yuvraj, Steve, Andy, Debbie or pictured here, Robert. Most of them prefer the Volvo B12BLE bendy buses to the newer non-articulated Volvo B7R because the B12's by virtue of having a bigger engine, make more torque that the B7s.
Especially on the Harbour Bridge, you wonder just how it is that a bus driver can thread an 18-Metre thing through traffic but I suppose that if you do it every day, you must pick up a fair amount of skill. Robert told me that on days like today when you couldn't even see the other end of the Harbour Bridge, that other drivers were more careful and were less likely to cut you off.
One of the scariest runs for bus drivers in Sydney is the southbound run from the Warringah Expressway to the Bridge. Buses have a dedicated bus lane from about Miller St onwards but after the Falcon St on ramps, there is a point where traffic for either the tunnel or the bridge switches lanes and crosses the bus lane. To pull up a 23-Tonne bus doing 70km/h doesn't happen immediately and on some occasions, I've seen drivers look somewhat worried when an errant car pulls out without warning.
In some respects, bus drivers are the unsung heroes of the road. From about 7:30-9:00AM and 2:30-4:00PM they become surrogate crowd control for school children. They're followed around by GPS and have to meet timetables and they have to drive through peak traffic as their job.
Still, I suppose that the view outside their office changes all the time and it must be said that on some runs if they get to see the harbour, those office views are stunning.
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