Actually some of these allegedly oversized buggies are much more manoueverable than say the standard McClaren techno, making them able to turn on a sixpence; absolutely necessary for getting on and off public transport without doing ones back in. Buggies like the urban detour and three wheelers are only marginally bigger than the McClaren so there is little in it. Most are designed to get through standard 800mm doorways (doorwidths for wheelchairs therefore making everywhere accessible). If you have more than one child you need something with the appropriate tensile strength to enable a double buggy to last a few years as they get a lot of wear and tear, more than a single.Theres no way around it; double buggies are bigger because the usually contain two children and need to be engineered to be easily pushed around, up and down kerbs etc as well as on and off buses. Unfortunately children take up a lot of room, but so do the overweight, those with briefcases, passengers with shopping etc, shopping carts, thick coats and even these fold up bicycles which are so prevalent these days, but I don't see threads complaining about those.

Young children ie 2/3/4 can usually walk but not that far without getting tired, so putting them into a buggy is a practical option especially when there is shopping to be carried as well.

I don't recall being condescending to childless people,as essentially, I have no idea which posters are childless and which are not, but there are plenty of people who have brought up kids in the past and perhaps have forgotten or are simply not aware of the practical challenges many parents face these days.

Unfortunately child hating, or perhaps child intolerance is still very much evident amongst posters here by their intent on parent and child bashing (metaphorically speaking of course) at almost every opportunity.

I have looked at the extract from tfl posted earlier and it doesn't actually require parents to get off the bus to let a wheelchair user on and if they can't fold the buggy for practical reasons then that won't be required so it appears that my voluntary intention, should it have been practical, would have been a goodwill gesture. So much for the rubbish hurled at me for refusing to do so. I'd like to see some of the posters here getting off or even offering their seats to others- load of hypocrisy.