Police set up a roadblock when a bus was caught heading the wrong way down a one-way street — because the driver desperately needed the lavatory.
Officers were flabbergasted when they spotted the woman steering the double-decker into the face of traffic along Lower Regent Street at 9.20pm yesterday.
After parking a police van sideways in front of the bus, Sergeant Izzy Harrison said she had not seen anything like it in her 25-year career.
“My first thought was ‘oh my God, someone’s stolen the bus’.
“But when we stopped it, the driver jumped off and said ‘sorry I need the loo’.
“She said she desperately needed to find a toilet and got confused.”
The No 23, which was not in service, had been heading along Shaftesbury Avenue when red lights forced it to stop in the bus lane at Piccadilly Circus.
As the driver waited in the queue, she felt a call of nature so pressing that she literally did not know which way to turn.
Then when the lights changed, she took an immediate left into Lower Regent Street — a one-way street packed with traffic coming straight towards her.
Sgt Harrison said: “Being a one-way street, people often only look one way when they’re crossing. Someone could easily have been hit.”
The woman, who is understood to have been driving buses for 20 years, was warned by police but not arrested.
