Horseshoe bus seats encourage chat

U-SHAPED seats have been introduced by a bus company in an attempt to nudge its passengers into speaking to each other.

It is also hoped the pilot scheme will allow large families to sit together, and stop people from putting bags on spare seats to deter strangers from sitting next to them. Go South Coast, which runs services across southern England, have installed the horseshoe seats on 13 of its buses in Wiltshire and Dorset. The new design seats eight people at the back of single-deckers.

Andrew Wickham, managing director of Go South Coast, said: “People have this idea of passengers sitting on the bus on their smartphones protecting the spare seat next to them. We’re not claiming we’re going to undo the smartphone revolution but if we can get people to look up from them and chat that can only be a good thing.”

ADorset bus company is rearranging seats into a horseshoe shape to encourage people to talk. It may be cheering when travellers exchange a civil word instead of glowering; but consider the other side of the argument. Hundreds of years of living in proximity have instilled a code of behaviour into British people corralled with strangers. They keep themselves to themselves. That is why they usually put down something on the free seat next to them – a shopping basket or a newspaper – as the equivalent of a sign saying: “Please do not sit beside me.” Indeed, for a stranger to sit next to an incumbent traveller in a halfempty bus (quite normal in many countries) is in Britain enough to provoke a nervous check on the position of the passenger alarm. No, the best road to Lytchett Matravers is still the quiet road.