TfL has just announced £6 million for toilets and welfare facilities for London’s bus drivers. It may not be the most glamorous transport investment, but it offers an interesting glimpse of the seemingly mundane infrastructure behind a bus journey.
The London Society has been talking about toilets for some time. Through our Lootopia campaign, we have argued that access to a loo is part of what makes London genuinely accessible. If you cannot be confident of finding one, it can affect whether you go out, how far you travel and how long you stay.
Until now, we have mostly looked at the issue from the passenger or pedestrian side of the toilet door. A new £6 million investment from Transport for London gives us a reason to open another door. TfL plans to provide 53 new toilet buildings for bus drivers over the next three years, adding to 154 locations where facilities have been installed or refurbished over the past eight years, with the aim of ensuring suitable provision across every London bus route.
With around 24,000 people driving London’s buses, there is a very practical reason for doing so.
The NHS suggests that urinating six to eight times in 24 hours is perfectly normal. It would be stretching the statistics to turn that into a daily total for London’s bus drivers: they do not all work every day, shifts vary considerably and bladders are not especially interested in averages. But it gives some idea of the scale of an extremely ordinary requirement that has to be accommodated somewhere within the bus network.
Most of us have experienced the childhood instruction to go to the loo before setting off, whether we need to or not, because nobody knows when the next opportunity will arise. Look at how toilet provision has historically been planned on London’s bus routes and there is a surprisingly recognisable logic. TfL has previously said that one toilet at one end of a route can provide sufficient coverage where the round trip takes less than 150 minutes; for longer round trips, facilities should be available at both ends.
Having a toilet on the map, of course, is not quite the same as being able to use it. Drivers have historically relied on facilities at bus garages and stations, alongside arrangements with cafés, petrol stations and other businesses. A loo that works perfectly well for the afternoon service might be little help to a night-bus driver arriving after the doors have been locked.
Earlier this year, TfL identified routes where toilet access still did not cover all operating hours, as well as routes with round trips of more than 150 minutes and a toilet at only one end. Where no facility is available at either terminus, TfL says additional time is built into the schedule to allow drivers to take a “comfort break”.
All of which sounds fairly manageable until a human need refuses to fit neatly into the timetable.
The experience is not the same for every driver. When London Assembly Member Caroline Russell raised the issue with the Mayor, she cited the experience of a female bus driver who had spoken about the anxiety of menstruating while driving without adequate toilet access, including the fear of bleeding onto the driver’s seat.
It is an uncomfortable example, but it makes the limitations of a simple toilet count rather clear. A facility may exist but be closed when a shift reaches it; another may depend on access to somebody else’s premises. And a planning assumption that one toilet is sufficient for a round trip of up to 150 minutes will inevitably work better for some people, and on some days, than others.
None of this is particularly new. In 2005, City Hall was already answering questions about drivers having to leave buses unattended to reach remote toilets. The practical solution was very specific: drivers should apply the parking brake, isolate the electrical system and close the doors before leaving the vehicle.
More than twenty years later, the £6 million programme is an attempt to improve the physical provision behind one of London’s most familiar public services and give drivers more dignity, instead of relying quite so heavily on workarounds.
Our work on Lootopia has concentrated on how toilets enable people to participate in London. The absence of somewhere to go can particularly affect older and disabled Londoners, people with health conditions and those travelling with young children. It can quietly shrink the city available to them.
Bus drivers bring a different perspective. Their workplace is the transport network itself and the places where they can stop are determined by the geography of the route they are working. Who knew that something approaching Olympic-level bladder planning might come with the job of driving a London bus?
That geography has to be planned alongside the buses themselves. A facility at the end of a route needs space, services and maintenance, and if a terminus moves the welfare facilities may have to move with it. During discussions about changes to buses around the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street, for example, driver toilet provision around Marble Arch was among the practical details that had to be considered.
There is another reason the timing of TfL’s announcement feels pertinent. After a hot summer brought renewed attention to conditions inside bus cabs, TfL, the Mayor, bus operators and Unite agreed earlier this month that cabs which do not meet the latest standards will be upgraded with modern ventilation and air conditioning by the end of May 2027. Toilets and air conditioning are very different interventions, but both recognise something easily lost when we talk about the people who “keep London moving”: people are not infrastructure themselves, and the infrastructure has to work for them too.
£6 million is modest beside the sums spent on London’s major transport projects. The 53 small buildings it will help provide are unlikely to attract much attention from passengers, but perhaps that is part of the point. Good infrastructure is not only the big, visible stuff. Sometimes it is the practical provision that allows thousands of people to do an ordinary day’s work with a reasonable degree of dignity.
