It’s official – you’d be quicker by chicken.

Huge, lumbering and largely empty, buses are the bane of many Londoners’ lives. I know, I know – it’s “wrong” to criticise such a wealth of public transport but you could sometimes walk from Marble Arch to Oxford Circus on the roofs of stationary buses. Now it’s been confirmed that a London bus moves more slowly than a chicken. Bus companies are privately owned, run for profit, yet receive huge state subsidies for carrying an agreed number of passengers. Which is why they’re the size of detached houses. And this disturbs my Inner Leftie. He wants buses returned to public ownership. He wants a new, much smaller Routemaster with a permanently open back, so people can jump on and off. And he wants them to be free. Then far more passengers will use them, traffic will be drastically reduced and they might go more like a cheetah than a chicken.