Each week, Ben Hopkinson looks back at a serious, crazy, and happy news story from the past week.
Serious News
London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan is investing £20million to try and get more people to use buses within the capital.
TfL will put the money for “fares innovation” which may reduce fares at specific times, as well as a free service when they initially launch.
Last year was the first in which bus passenger numbers fell since the pandemic, as there was 1.842 billion journeys made – down from 1.869 billion the year before. The trend has been downward, ever since the peak of 2014 where that year 2.4 billion journeys made.
London’s transport watchdog puts the cause down to the slow bus speeds. Average speeds in 2024-25 fell to 9.17mph, down from 10.27mph in 2022.
Speaking of the announcement of the approval of the annual budget last Thursday, Khan says: “We will be tasking TfL to look into ways we can encourage more people to use, in particular, buses. We're a city with a remarkable public transport system which is getting better all the time”.
£1.26billion of the budget was also spent on policing, while both TfL and London’s Fire Brigade had an increase of £250million each.
Crazy News
Over in America, a county in Ohio lost phone and internet services which also affected government offices.
An outage that occurred all the way back on February 20th was initially blamed on contractors cutting through a fibre cable underground – when the real cause was a squirrel.
Speaking at a commissioner’s meeting, County Administrator Matt Springer exposed the actual reasoning of a squirrel’s nest built within the fibre cabling and chewed through multiple cables.
He says that they are talking to internet service providers as well as the networking team to prevent this from happening again, adding: “It's hard to make this stuff up”.
Happy News
A fire department in Kentucky are turning to TikTok to share fire safety tips to the world.
The Owensboro Fire Department has sprinkled some humour into their skits in a bid to catch attention to those that would have just scrolled straight past.
It has seemed to work, as within days of launching, each of their videos have already racked up thousands of views.
@owensborofiredept We’re on TikTok! If this is where you are, this is where we’ll be. We’ve got important fire safety information to share, and we’re willing to get creative to make sure you see it! Follow the Owensboro Fire Department on Facebook, Instagram, and now TikTok.
♬ original sound - Owensboro Fire Dept.
Speaking of the page, Fire Chief James Howard says: “We want to make sure we are capturing as much of the demographic as we can”.
Battalion Chief Brian Roberts added: “We are not picky about where people learn fire-prevention habits, as long as the message gets out”.
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