Bendy bus accident rates

Somebody in Private Eye quoted some figures purporting to show that bendy buses are involved in more accidents than other London buses.

I wrote the following letter to the editor, but he didn't publish it:

Sir,

The statistics quoted by Ivan Viehoff (Eye 1211) don't necessarily prove that bendy buses are less safe than other buses. This is because the bendy buses in London run on only a small number of routes -- the highest-demand services which, by their nature, run on busier streets than other routes.

So in order to compare like with like, you would need to set the bendy bus accident rate against the accident rate for non-bendy buses on those same routes only. Perhaps some enterprising journalist could set about extracting these figures from Transport for London?

Yours,