Back in November, we wrote this piece about the fiasco surrounding a scrapped initiative to supposedly promote a campaign to recruit more bus drivers and also, a birthday month free bus travel offer: £10,000 - the cost of hubris 24.11.23. The promotion was going to take the form of decals on the side of a bus, as shown in the illustration above. The reason the promotion was scrapped at the last minute, after the considerable expense of producing and then applying the decals to the bus, was that the images of Dan Norris (the metro mayor of the West of England Combined Authority a.k.a. WECA) and his dog were too prominent. So prominent that it looked more like a promotional for Dan Norris than a campaign to recruit more drivers and encourage more people to use the buses. This is what we had to say about this utter shambles in the post linked to above:
Horribly familiar - even when there is some scrutiny (rare) there’s no accountability. I don’t think we even expect anything to happen to these people safe in their public sector sinecures. Never mind, try living in Wales, all this but on a bigger and more expensive scale. The cost of the 20mph roadsigns just the latest fiasco. One glimmer of hope is that most people are just quietly ignoring the signs. Ignoring the government however just allows them a freer hand to indulge in hubristic nonsense such as this.
Horribly familiar - even when there is some scrutiny (rare) there’s no accountability. I don’t think we even expect anything to happen to these people safe in their public sector sinecures. Never mind, try living in Wales, all this but on a bigger and more expensive scale. The cost of the 20mph roadsigns just the latest fiasco. One glimmer of hope is that most people are just quietly ignoring the signs. Ignoring the government however just allows them a freer hand to indulge in hubristic nonsense such as this.