The Glidd of Glood Blog

The newly babbling buses

There has been a new development on the buses. They now talk to you. The drivers are as silent as ever, but you wouldn’t expect them to have to concentrate on driving as well as talk. Indeed, there are often signs that say, “Do not talk to the driver”.

Unsurprisingly, the new voices on the buses are automated. The idea must have sounded very good in the meeting of the transport folk. They reasoned that London is a top tourist destination, and that consequently, many people who use the buses have little idea of where exactly they are going, nor when they should be getting off. They may even have had a focus group of tourists who explained that they used the Tube because it was more comprehensible than the bus system. Anxious to reduce the crowding on the Tube – a laudable objective – Transport for London imagined that if they could make the buses more understandable, they might encourage some tourists off the Tube and empowered to ride around the city, admiring the sights.

More likely than the above is the benefit for the partially or non-sighted. For the newly babbling buses announce every stop as you get to it but not only that (I wish to God that that was all it was), they also give you all sorts of other useless pieces of information. At every stop, they also tell you the number of the bus. A suitably friendly-sounding woman says “137 to….Streatham Hill” – if, that is, you are on the 137. I can’t see the point of this. You knew it was the 137 before you got on it, which is why you did get on it in the first place. If you were unsure, you might have asked the driver and he would probably bend the rules to answer you. So I think we can take it as read that unless very very stupid, you will know what bus you are on. This is further technologically aided by an electronic sign at the front of the bus that says….”137 to Streatham Hill”. So now you have to be overwhelmingly stupid and blind not to know what bus you are on and where it is going.

Nonetheless, some dolt somewhere has decided, in his (or hers – let’s not be sexist) infinite wisdom that at EVERY stop a pre-recorded voice will tell you the bus number and the destination, having just announced the stop a few second previously. Not content with this, we are also admonished at various intervals that we should be suspicious of unattended luggage, that we are not allowed to smoke (no one does and if they did, they wouldn’t be put off by some automated voice telling then that they shouldn’t be) and other obvious and unhelpful commentary.

Which all adds up to what? To yet more babble, more noise pollution that makes it impossible to concentrate on your book or your Sudoku puzzle. Just when you thought that you were safe from the girl a few seats back going into the sordid details of her private life on her mobile phone as she regales the whole of the top deck with the tedious minutiae of her existence (you’re not, by the way – it’s getting worse again), along comes TFL to make quite sure that your journey on the bus is going to be another misery-inducing experience – even if you did find a seat. No wonder about half the people on the bus are wearing iPods. You might not want to listen to death metal at that time in the morning, but anything is preferable to TFL.

It was all more fun with bus conductors issuing you with arcane pieces of paper from their completely incomprehensible machines, and ting-tinging the bell. And you could get off at traffic lights that always seemed to be red. Nostalgia. Nostalgia.

If you too would like to vote against the talking bus system, TFL kindly have a website where you can make your opinion heard. It probably won't make any difference but still.. https://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/contact/default.asp?type=buses

Sorry Sir - I've already written the ticket

OK, time to kick up a scandal.

I can’t help noticing how most of the traffic wardens in London come from the ethnic minorities. Which is a wishy-washy way of saying that they have a darker skin colour than most of the native inhabitants of the British Isles.

And my question is : is this the best way to foster harmonious race-relations? After all, traffic wardens must be amongst the most reviled people in just about any country that doesn’t have a fully-paid up secret police. What is the effect on all those predominantly white car drivers who park their 4x4s in London when a poor guy who is looking for a way to make an honest crust comes and sticks a £120 fine on them (reduced to a mere £60 if paid in a fortnight)?

I think that people might just possibly equate the messenger with the organisation who sent him. It is barely the fault of the traffic warden. Can you imagine, traipsing the streets of London in the rain in the sole hope of ticketing hapless motorists? Doing a job whose only satisfaction and success can be measured in the amount of people you have managed to piss-off in a day? The reason once again why traffic wardens in London are predominently black is because white people don’t want to do the job, and presumably, don’t have to. It’s not as if anyone wants to do it much. We sneer at those who find themselves working at MacDonalds, but at least these people are performing a useful public service and can contribute to making our lives happier (thought there would be those who argue that to achieve this aim, you should steer well clear of MacDonalds – I’m not going there).

Naturally, you could argue that traffic wardens are also performing a useful public service. But we all know that that is complete tosh. Giving someone a £120 fine for occupying a parking bay for a few minutes is just evil and indicative of the mindset of those who run UK plc. In Switzerland, the fine is £20 which is quite motivational enough to encourage you not to overstay your welcome. And in Switzerland, you don’t have to start using a mobile phone and a credit card, trawling through endless “menus” to pay for your parking as you do in bits of the West End.

Nope. Doing the traffic warden’s job in London is to work for the clampdown – there is just no way of getting away from it. All the more reason that in this era of sickening political correctness, the ethnic minorities should be supported by being not allowed to monopolise the traffic warden function – so that we can loathe a section of the white community equally too. But once again, no one has thought this through. I am sure that there are those who think we are doing these poor people a favour by giving them the job, when in fact we are subjecting them to a great disservice. Something needs to be done about it.

Do you suppose the new candidates for mayor are listening to me? Is anyone? Hello? Hello?

Scandal in the NCP carpark

There is an NCP carpark round the corner from where I work. It is one of the most hideously depressing places in the world (although the subterranean depths of the Elephant and Castle, which look like a Chinese supermarket down there amid the scuzz, run it a close second). What the NCP has over the Elephant and Castle, though, is whiff. The ground floor, where you go in, stinks of piss. I don't mean a faint odour of Blue Loo and public conveniences, I mean it reeks of stale urine, in a "hand me that clothes peg" sort of way. Indeed, not so stale, you might think, to keep up such virulence.

I suppose this isn't so surprising. There are plenty of down-and-outs, sadly spending their interminable nights on sheets of cardboard round the back of Oxford Street, and the odd bottle of beer must make life a little more numb, a little less unbearable. And what goes in, must come out, somewhere. So the NCP carpark seems to be a favoured location.

But here are a few interesting facts about that carpark:

1. It costs about £30 a day to park your car in it. So you can't see how it could be grossing anything less than £3'000 a day. It's iniquitous, isn't it?

2. In addition to having no cleaning staff, apparently, it just doesn't seem to have any staff at all. I've never seen anyone there. This must make good business sense.

3. The foully pungent lift, has a useless feature that says: "The doors are now closing" when they do. As the doors are within arm's length, it is quite hard to miss this fact without having to be told. "Ah-hah", you say, "all very well for you. You're not blind, are you? Well supposing you were, wouldn't you be glad that someone thought to tell you what is going on? Why not think of the handicapped for a change?"

OK, but wait a minute. If a blind person is in a multi-storey carpark, they are either accompanied by a sighted person, in which case they can be told to look out for the snapping jaws of the closing lift doors, or they are in the wrong place. I mean, what use does an unaccompanied blind person have for a multi-storey carpark? It's not as if they are going to be driving anywhere (you hope), or even capable of locating their car on their own – a task which is pretty taxing even for the sighted.

So it makes you think that maybe the audible warnings are simply to serve a blind down-and-out who might have inadvertently stepped into the lift for a pee.

Here is my advice to you, NCP: get the place cleaned regularly and disconnect the annoying lift babble. What's so hard about that? For 30 quid a day, is that too much to ask?

The vagaries of London buses

London. This town is becoming increasingly Kafka-esque. I caught the 55 bus back from the agency to the office Thursday afternoon, waiting for it in the pouring rain (of course). The 55 is a handy bus, as it runs from the office right to the agency, or vice versa – amazingly. The first thing that happened was that three 243's or whatever they were (I suppose I could check, but does it really matter?) appeared simultaneously, which made me chuckle. There is nothing that remarkable, no doubt, about three buses bearing the same number showing up at once, but it just seems more, what? inevitable? when you are waiting for a different one and it is pouring with rain. Still, the 55 did stop moments later and I boarded it gratefully and went and sat on the top deck. There was someone behind me snoring loudly.

Off it pootled, crawling through the traffic until at Holborn, the lights went off and on a few times and people started getting off. In fact, everyone got off. I assume that the flashing of the lights is an arcane signal to us all to abandon ship. Another irony: Although London Transport is continually communicating with you such needless rubbish as "Mind the gap!" and "Beware of the closing doors" or even "Passengers are reminded to take special care as the platform may be slippery due to the adverse weather conditions" (i.e.: "it is raining – try not to fall over"), when you would like to know what is going on, such as when your bus decides to stop midway through your journey and evict you, they are completely silent. So I just prodded the bloke behind me awake and trooped out into the rain with everyone else.

An 8 soon came along, saying Oxford Circus, so I jumped on. The 8 normally goes all the way to Victoria. But about 100m short of Oxford Circus, it stopped, flashed the interior lights a few times, and we all got off into the rain again. I asked the driver on the way out what was going on. "Normally this bus goes to Victoria, but this one is stopping here." Why? Why do they do that?

A London bus, about to stop at un unexpected location