"...give us a sign"

I encountered a most bizarre situation the other day that has left me troubled at the state of this country's sanity.

It all began whilst I was walking along Oxford Street in London. I made my way out of Oxford Circus tube station and turned left towards Marble Arch. As I walked along I noticed a sign on the near side of the road informing buses and other traffic of the left-lane's closure and that there was a diversion system in place. As I walked further up the road I approached the reason why that one lane of traffic had been stopped; a rather large crane doing engineering work on one of the shop buildings being totally refitted.

I walked past the crane and the workmen and continued along a half closed Oxford Street, towards Marble Arch; the far side bustling with traffic, the near side quiet due to the closure of the lane because of the crane.

As I walked, something struck me as weird.

There were no taxis going past. Because the near side lane of traffic was closed.
There were no buses going past. Because the near side lane of traffic was closed.

Yet there were people at the bus stops all along the street.

I looked around, for a split-second doubting my memory of the road's closure but a glance down the road towards the crane and the signs in the road proved my own sanity. I looked at the bus stop and noticed huge yellow signs that read "Bus-Stop not in use". Walking into the empty lane I glanced one more time at the blockage in the road to make perfectly sure that the road was in fact closed before approaching one of the hopeful bus-stop inhabitants and saying

"You do know there are no buses coming down this side of the street right?"

Confusion descended on all those who heard my shocking revelation! A general sense of "pardon?" eminated from the would-be passengers. I explained about the signs and the crane and the lack of traffic and the whole re-routing of public transport thing and gestured in the general direction of bus stops that were actually in use.
Eventually they dispersed and I continued my stroll along the road.

I approached another bus stop... once again crowded with people... waiting. One of the wait-ers was a finely dressed gentleman with whom I shared my knowledge of the road closure and the lack of buses to which he replied "well, what are all these other people waiting for then?"

"Exactly the same thing you are Sir. Nothing." came my ever-so-slightly sarcastic reply.

As I moved on from delivering my good news to those people three thoughts entered my mind. The first was that some people actually remained at the bus stop; just sitting, waiting... for a bus service that didn't exist.
The second was that I had been walking for about twenty mintues by this point, and the road had clearly been closed for some considerable time before my arrival, and so no traffic at all had been past any of those bus stops for at least half an hour. Surely someone would've guessed that 'perhaps the usual bus service was not operational at that point in time'.
Thirdly, the London Bus Company had left huge great yellow signs informing the public that the bus stops were not in use and the whacking great crane in the middle of the road hindering any buses using the street would only have underlined that message.

"A person can be smart, but People are stupid."

Written instructions and messages and signs and obvious, huge, powerful works didn't help people waste their lives that Saturday. It took a person to step out and tell them of their mistake and inform them of the truth (and even then some people didn't believe the truth when they heard it).

If the public don't 'get it' about waiting for a bus, how on earth do we expect them to know any better about anything with more significance?!