As any Londoner will tell you, the daily commute can be a hellish business. Most people have to endure a good half hour of being tightly crammed into sweaty, stuffy carriages, which can sometimes push even the most placid person to breaking point. A noticeable trend recently on my commute is an increase in the number of (typically glazed-eyed) kids who play crap dance music really loudly through the speakers on their mobiles.
This manages to make the commute even worse. People look around, irritated and roll eyes at each other. Others will talk openly to one another about how unfair it is for one person to impose their musical tastes on everyone else. In the age of the iPod, these kids could simply put on headphones. Playing loud music in a packed bus can only be a deliberate attempt to wind people up.
An online survey by the organisation Music Free Buses suggests that 60 per cent of passengers claim that ‘fear of reprisals’ stop them from speaking out about against this curious pastime. Music Free Buses found that 80 per cent of passengers find people playing mobiles or mp3s out loud ‘inappropriate’.
I’ve told kids to switch their music off on several occasions, and it works. Yet rather than encouraging people to speak out and face such apparently heinous reprisals as a mumbled swearword, Music Free Buses instead is encouraging commuters to sign a petition to ban people from listening to music without headphones on buses.
As the letter pages in the London Lite newspaper suggest, this campaign has struck a common chord. Hundreds of people have signed up. The only discussion seems to be about the feasibility of its implementation. ‘There are no conductors and the driver is not going to come out of his cab unless the bus is on fire’, said one letter writer. It seems that the only reason for the ban is that people want to feel they have the law on their side before they speak out.
How sad that adults seem to want to have something enshrined in law before they have the confidence to speak out against it. This not only disempowers adults in everyday situations; it also contributes to today’s ban-happy climate, where we seek to outlaw something rather than deal with it ourselves.
Patrick Hayes
