Lowri Griffiths on why a slow, unglamorous bus route tells you more about London than any borough report ever will

I have taken the same bus route twice a day for the better part of three years, and I have come to think of it as the single most reliable piece of social research available to anyone willing to sit still for forty minutes and pay attention rather than stare at a phone.

A Route That Refuses to Pretend

The route I take crosses four boroughs, passes through a stretch of extremely expensive Victorian terraces, a shopping parade that has had the same launderette since before I was born, a new-build development still wrapped in scaffolding advertising a lifestyle nobody currently living on the route can afford, and a housing estate that has been earmarked for regeneration for longer than I’ve been taking the bus.

Nobody designed the 87, or whatever number your own equivalent happens to be, as a piece of social commentary. It simply follows the shortest sensible path between two points, and the shortest sensible path in this city happens to pass through every version of London simultaneously, which no amount of borough branding or estate agent copy can obscure once you’re sitting on the top deck watching it go by.

Transport for London Doesn’t Advertise This, But the Data Backs It Up

Route-level ridership and journey pattern data is published by Transport for London, and it shows what anyone who actually rides the buses already knows: bus ridership skews toward exactly the residents that policy discussion in this city talks about least, older residents, lower income households, people without the option of a car or a bike or, frankly, the physical capacity for either.

Borough-level income and demographic data from the Office for National Statistics maps almost perfectly onto who is actually on the bus at any given hour. The tube gets the infrastructure investment and the glossy campaign posters. The bus gets the people the tube was never really built for in the first place, and it gets them there anyway, slowly, reliably, for a fraction of the price.

The Overheard Conversation Economy

Three years of eavesdropping, which I will defend as a legitimate journalistic method under the specific circumstances of enforced proximity, has taught me more about actual London life than any number of panel discussions I’ve sat through for work.

I have heard a landlord negotiate a rent increase over the phone in a tone he would never use in writing. I have heard two teenagers plan a surprise party with a level of logistical precision that would embarrass most corporate away days. I have heard, on one unforgettable Tuesday, a full and detailed account of a family feud spanning three generations and two continents, delivered entirely for the benefit of a stranger who had asked, politely, for the time.

What the Bus Knows That the Papers Don’t

• Regeneration announcements land completely differently depending on which stop you’re standing at when you hear about them.
• The genuine cost of living crisis is legible in real time on a bus in a way it isn’t in a spreadsheet, because you can watch someone doing the arithmetic on whether to get off one stop early to save the fare on a connecting journey.
• Nobody on the bus believes the new development’s marketing material, and everybody on the bus can tell you, with real specificity, who they think it’s actually for.
• The driver knows more about the state of this city’s infrastructure than most councillors, and nobody has ever thought to ask him.

Why I’m Not Getting a Car

People assume, reasonably, that anyone who could avoid the bus would. I could, mostly. I choose not to, and it isn’t romanticism, or at least not entirely. It’s that the bus remains one of the last places in this city where you are forced, structurally, to share space with people whose lives don’t otherwise intersect with yours, and I think that’s worth something even on the days it makes me twenty-five minutes late.

More from me, including a running and increasingly unhinged log of things I’ve overheard, at my running archive at The London Prat.

For a companion piece on how this city’s infrastructure gets discussed versus how it actually functions, see the coverage of administrative expansion standing in for the harder structural fix, and for the transatlantic version of buses carrying more of the city’s real weight than anyone in charge likes to admit, this account of an operational response to a stationary object is a strange but genuinely instructive read.

I mentioned this piece to the driver on my usual route, mostly out of politeness, and he told me, without missing a beat, that he could write his own version and it would be considerably longer, because he’s been doing this specific route for eleven years and has, in his words, seen this entire city grow up, move out, and occasionally move back again, several times over, from the same seat.

I also, in the interest of full disclosure, once missed my stop entirely because I was too absorbed in someone else’s phone call to notice we’d gone three stops past mine, which is either a professional hazard or a personal failing, and I have not fully decided which.

Further coverage at the wider British political desk archive, and the humour desk at Bohiney Magazine.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/