City Bus Driver

From seaside roundabouts to leafy campuses, the 45 is a route with serious character. It cuts through city bustle, village calm, and enough student territory to fill a freshers’ fair. Here’s my homework run, so I don’t turn the first shift into a scenic mystery tour. The 45 is one of those routes that feels like three or four services stitched together. You start at the coast, with the smell of salt air and seagulls already plotting your chips, before plunging into the heart of town, dodging tourists and traffic lights. From there it snakes out through villas, sports fields, and village charm, finishing among the lecture halls and modern sprawl of Heriot-Watt. I’ve not driven it yet, this is me laying the map out in my head, due diligence before go-live, with a side order of humour to keep the roads from blurring together. Seaside Start to Abbeyhill We kick off at Marine Roundabout near Portobello, pointing the nose of the bus west. The first stretch runs along King’s Road, then sweeps...

Balerno begonias to Whitecraig crescents, this route’s got more twists than a soap opera omnibus. I’ve not driven it yet, but the stop list alone reads like an endurance test for the memory. So here’s my homework draft: six sections, just suburban sprawl, city bustle, seaside whiffs, and East Lothian crescents galore. Before you ever take the wheel on a new route, there’s the small matter of homework. That means staring at a list of stops, mouthing them like a spell, and trying to picture how one suburb morphs into the next. The 44 is a fine example: it stretches from Balerno at one end to Whitecraig at the other, touching everything from leafy crescents to Princes Street chaos. I haven’t driven it yet, this is me preparing, tea in hand, eyebrows already twitching at the sheer length of it. Think of this less as a timetable and more as a survival guide, with added sarcasm to keep the brain cells awake. Balerno Beginnings – The Suburban Stretch Start at Cockburn Crescent, which sounds p...

I’ve never driven the 21, but I already know its rhythm: the sharp inhale before a narrow turn, the lull of wide suburban streets, the murmur of students crossing in Sighthill, and the quiet expectation of reaching the Royal Infirmary.  Today, it exists only in my notebook, in imagined brake lights and familiar smells of the city, as I try to memorise six sections of Edinburgh one careful corner at a time. Clovenstone to Sighthill – The Estate Escape Clovenstone’s your starting pistol, low-rise flats, stairwells, and the sound of doors shutting just as you pull up. Wester Hailes Park and Hailesland Place blend into each other with that west Edinburgh rhythm: plenty of crossing points, kids darting across the grass shortcuts, and the odd shopping trolley that’s somehow migrated half a mile from the supermarket. Murrayburn Park brings more of the same before Westside Plaza appears, part shopping centre, part social hub, part clock you can set your watch by. From there, Calder Drive s...

From coastline breezes to hilltop views, I’m plotting the perfect route, before I’ve even touched the steering wheel. Crossing Edinburgh without leaving my chair: A homework journey on Service 4. A desk-chair journey across Edinburgh, from campus calm to Pentland peaks, undertaken with nothing but a stop list, an overactive imagination, and the faint hope that the live version won’t involve too much swearing. Section 1: The Academic Warm-Up We start at Queen Margaret University, a place where the roads are wide, the air is fresh, and the biggest hazard is probably a student wandering out mid-scroll on their phone. From Queen Margaret Drive to Milton Link, it’s all fairly civilised, the sort of stretch where you think, I could do this all day. Then comes Corbiewynd and Parrotshot. According to Street View, these are perfectly normal residential turns. But I’ve driven enough “normal” turns to know they can become “hold-my-coffee” moments once real-life Edinburgh drivers get involved. By ...

So, I haven’t driven the 26 yet, not a single stop behind the wheel. Instead, I’m doing what sensible drivers do: hitting the books (or in this case, Google Maps and Street View) to get ahead of the game before the big day. This route stretches from Drum Brae Gardens, a place so quiet you could hear a squirrel sneeze, all the way to Seton Sands, where holidaymakers outnumber the pigeons. Over 80 stops, five distinct sections, and enough variety to keep me on my toes for a while. Section 1: Drum Brae to Haymarket, Where the Suburbs Whisper (And Parked Cars Plot) We kick off at Templeland Road, an area so residential that the biggest challenge might be convincing parked cars to share the road. Seriously, it’s like they hold secret meetings on who’ll fold in their wing mirror next. The Edinburgh Zoo stop looks like a highlight, where kids hyped on sugar and excitement take over the pavement like a small, energetic stampede. I’m bracing myself for the chaos before it even starts. Past Murr...

No, it’s not just the heating on full blast. You smell smoke. It’s not the usual chip wrappers or someone sneaky vaping upstairs, this one’s real. Don’t panic. You’re not expected to fight it, just handle it. Stop the bus, get folk off safely, and call it in. Job done. Now, here’s how to do that without making the six o’clock news. Right, let's not beat about the bush. If you ever find yourself driving along and notice smoke sneaking out from somewhere it shouldn’t, or worse, you smell burning and it’s not just someone’s leftover chips, then congratulations, your shift just got a whole lot more interesting. Now’s not the time to panic. Here’s what to do. First off, stop the bus. Sounds obvious, but you’d be amazed. Bring it to a halt as safely as possible. We’re aiming for “calm professional” not “emergency stop on a roundabout.” Try to avoid stopping in tunnels, outside schools, or next to anything that might go boom, petrol stations being top of that list. But if the fire’s getti...

There’s a particular kind of silence on a bus when the driver’s clearly lost. It’s polite. Deafening. Forty pairs of eyes pretending not to notice as you brake-check your dignity and mutter, “Just testing the brakes, folks.” That’s the nightmare scenario. It lives rent-free in every driver’s head when learning a new route. So, how do you avoid starring in your own mid-shift navigational horror film? You plan. You cheat. You become a master of controlled blagging. And you build a route learning strategy that works with your brain, not against it. A tangled ball of earphones resting beside a neatly coiled bus route map on a plain table. Homework Comes First (Yes, Really) Before I even set foot near the driver’s seat, I treat Google Maps like a tactical battlefield. The stop list isn’t just a list, it’s a puzzle to break down. I don’t look at it as a straight A-to-B run; I chop it into zones that make sense to me. Suburban crawl, city centre free-for-all, and that last stretch where you e...