Public transport comes with lots of grab rails and grab poles. The idea being that you can either hang onto them through your journey, or make a grab for one when the vehicle lurches.
The rails and poles in trains - both overground and underground - are reasonably non-slip, so if you grab hard enough you get some traction in some direction which is not at right angles to the pole. So if, for example, you grab a vertical pole in an effort not to crash into your neighbour, it does not work if your tightest grip just slides around the pole - and you rotate around the pole with it, crashing nicely into said neighbour. Grabbing two poles would work, but that is not usually an option.
The steps in railway stations and tube stations are usually very non-slip, with one's feet rarely slipping on their leading edges.
But London buses fail. Their poles and rails are not non-slip at all, which might easily have very untoward consequences when you try coming down the stairs before the bus comes to a complete stop - because waiting would slow everything down for everybody else.
One would think that at £333,333 a pop, or whatever Boris paid for the things, a simple and important matter like the hand rail on the stairs could have been got right.
PS: on some of the older tube lines, such as the City Branch of the Northern Line, the wooden hand rails provided for the steps sometimes come with bosses or bumps every couple of feet or so. An effective if potentially painful form of non-slip.
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