Whaaattt?

A number of years ago (almost 20, frighteningly) I was dragged into a case where someone bought a house on a bus route that we operated - bulk of it's operation was single deck, but four double decks were used as they also covered school bus journeys, although they remained out all day. Occasionally, if we were short of single decks, we'd plop doubles on the route, because we knew there was no physical restriction for them not to be used.

This new resident, with bus stop outside his property, complained bitterly whenever there were double decks, arguing that they were so heavy they would thump over bumps and shake his house... yet single decks weren't an issue. Around the same time, we got 5 of the early hybrid prototypes to test, which had massive batteries on the roof, and they were plonked onto this route.

After many months of back and forth via letters/emails etc, I agreed to do a site visit and meet this chap to hear his concerns, and during the conversation he reiterated that it wasn't the height of the bus that bothered him, but rather the weight as they banged and made his house shake - I asked what he thought of the new hybrid buses with the big batteries on the roof as they were only about 18-inches or so shy of a double-deck in terms of height - - not a problem with those, he confirmed. One of them arrived whilst we were stood there, so I introduced him to the legal lettering that all PCV's must have, part of which is the unladen weight of the vehicle - - I then explained that a double deck was almost 4-tons more than a standard single deck, these new hybrids were around only 150kg less than the weight of a double deck thanks to the batteries, so I was therefore perplexed as to why the issue was showing with double decks and not the hybrids.... funnily enough, we never heard from him again.