Everyone complains about the bus, and everyone is wrong: it is the one place in this stratified city where we are all, briefly, equal

As a writer for Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, I spend a great deal of time on public transport, partly for research and partly because, as established in my previous dispatch about rent, I cannot afford taxis. And I have come to a conclusion that will be unpopular: the London bus is the best thing about this city, and we do not deserve it.

Everyone complains about the bus. It is too slow, they say. It is too crowded. It never comes and then three come at once, an observation so universal it has become less a complaint than a folk saying, the London equivalent of remarking on the weather. And all of this is true. The bus is slow and crowded and arrives in herds. And it is, despite all of this, magnificent.

The Great Leveller

Consider who is on the bus. The banker and the bin man. The student and the pensioner. The new mother wrestling a buggy and the old man who has clearly been having an argument with himself since Tottenham. On the bus, the hedge-fund manager who lives in the gated mansion and the care worker who cleans it sit on the same sticky seat, breathe the same overheated air, and share the same despair when the driver announces this bus terminates here.

There is nowhere else in London where this happens. The city is otherwise ruthlessly sorted, the rich in their neighbourhoods and the rest in ours, the worlds barely touching. But the bus does not care who you are. It charges everyone the same, seats everyone the same, and strands everyone the same when it inexplicably sits at a stop for nine minutes while the driver does something mysterious with a clipboard. It is, I would argue, the last genuinely democratic space in the capital.

The Tube Is For Tourists And Cowards

The Tube, by contrast, is a disgrace, a hot tube of strangers avoiding eye contact while hurtling through darkness, paying a fortune for the privilege of not seeing the city at all. I have written, over at my column, in defence of many unfashionable things, but never the Tube, which deserves no defence. The bus, at least, lets you see where you are going, even if where you are going is, at current speeds, achievable faster on foot.

The serious point, beneath my bus evangelism, is that public transport is one of the few genuinely shared goods left in a city that has privatised, gated, and sorted itself into separate worlds. The reporting on London widening inequality, which I follow closely and link to often, paints a picture of a city pulling apart. The bus is one of the few threads still holding it together, and we treat it with contempt.

So the next time you are on the bus, slow and crowded and arriving in a herd, look around. Look at the unlikely congregation of Londoners sharing this lumbering red box. It is, for all its faults, a small daily miracle of a shared city, and it costs less than a coffee. We do not deserve it. But we have it, and I, for one, intend to keep riding it, slowly, all the way to the end of the line.

I have my regular routes, as every bus devotee does, and I know their characters intimately. The 29 is chaos incarnate, a rolling drama of missed stops and shouted phone calls. The 91 is genteel, almost suburban, its passengers reading actual books. The night bus is a category unto itself, a moving theatre of the city after midnight, where the joyful drunk and the exhausted shift worker and the bewildered tourist all sway together toward dawn.

The drivers, too, deserve a word, for they are the unsung custodians of this democratic space, navigating the impossible streets, refereeing the disputes, announcing with weary patience that the bus is on diversion due to an incident, that great catch-all phrase that could mean anything from a burst water main to a fallen tree to events one would rather not imagine. They keep the whole creaking system moving, and they are rarely thanked.

There is an art to bus-riding that the uninitiated lack, the knowing when to ring the bell, the claiming of the prized front seat on the top deck, the delicate negotiation of the buggy-and-wheelchair space that periodically erupts into the city only true class war. The seasoned rider navigates these waters with grace; the novice, the tourist, the occasional rider, blunders through, ringing the bell too early, sitting in the wrong seat, standing in the doors. We forgive them. Mostly.

The view from the top deck is the city best free entertainment, a slow-rolling panorama of London in all its variety, the grand and the grotty, the ancient and the absurd, the man arguing with a pigeon outside the betting shop and the wedding party spilling out of the register office, all of it unfolding below as the bus grinds its patient way across the city. No taxi offers this. No Tube. Only the bus, and only from the top deck, front seat, if you can get it.

More in this vein at NewsThump.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/