A North London Resident’s Annual Recommitment to the Tube Despite Its Best Efforts to Lose Her

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

By Lowri Griffiths | North London | prat.uk/author/lowri-griffiths/

The Annual Betrayal and the Annual Decision

Transport for London has announced its annual fare increase. The percentage is in the range that has become familiar through repetition: above inflation in some formulations, described as “in line with” something in others, and received by London commuters with the resigned acceptance of people who have factored this into their financial planning because the alternative is too expensive to consider. By “too expensive to consider” I mean a car, which in London costs more to own, park, insure, and fuel than any plausible public transport expenditure, while also adding the specific pleasure of being stuck in traffic on the Holloway Road at 8:30 a.m., which is a pleasure I have sampled and declined.

I will not be getting a car. I will be paying the new fare. I will occasionally, on the specific mornings when the Northern Line is suspended between stations that bracket my journey, text someone expressing feelings about Transport for London that I would not put in print. Then the suspension will resolve, the service will resume, and I will return to the position I have always held: that the tube, despite its costs, its delays, its periodic decisions to be partially inoperative on exactly the day that partial operability would be most inconvenient, is one of London’s genuine achievements and I am grateful for it in the way that you are grateful for things that you could not manage without even when they are making your morning significantly worse than it needed to be.

What TfL Actually Provides

The London Underground carries approximately 3.5 million passengers per day. It connects the city’s geography in ways that make it possible to live in North London and work in South London, or vice versa, or in any of the directional combinations that London’s employment and residential geography creates. Without it, the city’s spatial configuration — the way its different economic functions are distributed across areas that are many miles apart — would be unworkable for most of its population. TfL is not just a transport system. It is the infrastructure of how London functions. The Time Out London travel guides take TfL’s existence for granted as the baseline condition for navigating the city. They are right to do so. The baseline condition is expensive and occasionally infuriating and fundamentally necessary.

The fare increase is real. The service improvements it is supposed to fund are less visible than the increase itself, which is the standard asymmetry of infrastructure investment: you feel the cost immediately and the benefit over years. The Northern Line extension to Battersea Power Station was once a promise and is now a fact. Crossrail was once a legend and is now the Elizabeth Line and it is genuinely excellent. These things took longer and cost more than announced. They exist. They carry people. The investment produced the infrastructure. The infrastructure will carry fare increases that future commuters will complain about while using it. This is how cities are built.

Mother’s Day Transit

Today is Mother’s Day. TfL is running Sunday service, which means reduced frequency on most lines but continued operation across the network. The mothers of London are taking the tube to their children’s Sunday lunches, or their children are taking the tube to reach them, or the combination is navigated via the specific logistics of London family geography that the tube makes possible. Happy Mother’s Day from a Northern Line commuter who will continue paying whatever TfL charges because the alternative is the Holloway Road at 8:30 a.m., and no amount is worth that. The fare is paid. The tube runs. London continues.

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Living in London means navigating the city’s contradictions daily: the extraordinary alongside the exasperating, the world-class alongside the occasionally third-rate, the genuinely welcoming alongside the socially impenetrable. The contradictions are not bugs. They are the city’s character. A London without contradictions would be a different city — probably a more comfortable one, certainly a less interesting one. The discomfort is where the texture lives. The texture is what we stay for. Or at least what I stay for, eleven years into a North London residence that I have never quite decided is permanent and have never quite seriously considered ending. The city has you or it doesn’t. When it has you, the contradictions become the reasons. When it doesn’t, no amount of good weather or craft gin selections will change that. It has me. Happy Mother’s Day, London. You are exhausting and irreplaceable.

Living in London means navigating the city’s contradictions daily: the extraordinary alongside the exasperating, the world-class alongside the occasionally third-rate, the genuinely welcoming alongside the socially impenetrable. The contradictions are not bugs. They are the city’s character. A London without contradictions would be a different city — probably a more comfortable one, certainly a less interesting one. The discomfort is where the texture lives. The texture is what we stay for. Or at least what I stay for, eleven years into a North London residence that I have never quite decided is permanent and have never quite seriously considered ending. The city has you or it doesn’t. When it has you, the contradictions become the reasons. When it doesn’t, no amount of good weather or craft gin selections will change that. It has me. Happy Mother’s Day, London. You are exhausting and irreplaceable.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/