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Three dread words Replacement Bus Service
If there are three words that can strike gloom into the heart of any traveller within the bounds of London, it is the phrase above. The art of getting from here to there is complicated by the dusty ejection from train or tube onto the road, where one is placed at the mercy of the traffic jams and Livingstone’s nightmarish road policy. Worse, the replacement bus must follow the path of the railway or underground, twisting and turning back upon itself, prolonging what was expected to be a straightforward and swift journey.
Such journeys are tolerable if there is time to relax and alternative routes prove just as long. But, if it is the last train or tube, and the only alternative is the night bus, then you are well and truly screwed. You will be a long time getting home.
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I dunno. The N20 is great at getting from Trafalgar Square to Finchley in the dead of night, just as good as the Northern and sometimes faster! N29 is pickpocket central at the moment, though.
You southerners have it easy. Try living in Manchester.
You should try having your daily commute trebled for what’s initially three months, then six, and now more likely 12 because of a combination of cr*p project management and dodgy Italian signalling that doesn’t work.
If they’d pulled a stunt like this in London, there’d be riots on the street.
That particular scenario was fairly typical of today’s London Underground. They cancelled the service effectively from Parsons Green, telling passengers to get off there and take the Replacement Bus Service to Wimbledon; however if you wanted to go to East Putney you had to stay on the train to the next stop and then get a separate Replacement Bus Service from there. But if you wanted to go from Wimbledon to Parsons Green you had to take the Replacement Bus Service all the way to Fulham Broadway and then get a train back to Parsons Green. Why they could not have just run a bus shuttle service from Putney Bridge to Wimbledon, as any sane individual could have organised, beats me.
OT, and from a very-occasional commenter, so my apologies if this is unwanted noise, but…
I was walking through King’s Cross tube on Friday evening and encountered what amounted to a low-key police checkpoint. In the longer of the three-sides-of-a-square passageway that one has to take to get from Circle Line to Northern Line (locals will know the place I mean), about 20 police officers had taken over the left-hand side of the corridor. They had cordoned the space off, and had filled it with a number of tables and what appeared to be a metal-detecting arch, like the ones used at airports. On the arch was a sign saying something along the lines of “anti-knife crime unit”.
Policemen were approaching a subset of the passing members of the public, and asking them to come over to the side; I did not clearly see what was happening then, but it looked like the officers were searching bags, and I saw them patting down one individual.
I suspect that they were using some kind of profiling – all of the people they were talking to were young men, late teens to early 30s, mostly wearing sports clothing. There was no obvious racial bias. (As a point of honesty, I must admit that if I had been asked to identify those members of the crowd most likely to be carrying weapons, I would have picked out precisely the same people. This doesn’t justify anything, it’s just an observation.)
It was unclear what would have happened had someone refused to be searched, as the two or three people I saw approached did not demur, I was not approached myself, and I did not stop for long (which makes me wonder – when did I start feeling that watching a police operation was not a good thing to do?). However, the passageway – like many of those in tube stations – is designed to funnel people in one direction and one only, so it would have been very difficult for anyone to turn around and walk away. And I suspect it would have been problematic for anyone to refuse to talk to the police but walk on by regardless.
Some thoughts and questions:
* Is this normal? I’ve been living in London for 10 years now, and I’ve never seen anything like it, but perhaps in areas with higher levels of crime it happens daily.
* More importantly, is this legal? I know that there have been police officers searching tube passengers for bombs since the attacks last year, but knives? I was under the impression that policemen needed to have reasonable suspicion that an individual was committing a crime before searching them, but that could only have been so on the most generous of interpretations in this case.
* Joining those two points together – was the event an example of some kind of mission creep? That is, was an operation that started out as an anti-terrorist measure turning into an excuse for a more intrusive form of law enforcement?
ATB
Giles
There are signs all over the underground exhorting people to cooperate with police searches for greater security – which would lead one to believe this is being done as another form of compulsory volunteering.
There’s possibly a piece of conceptual bootstrapping going on: failure to cooperate with being searched may well be deemed suspicious behaviour – providing reasonable grounds for a search.
The other thing is that this is the tube, not the street. Failure to cooperate might result in your permission to travel being withdrawn. Transport for London has shown itself exceedingly willing to participate in managing public behaviour as a matter of institutional officiousness – it has a mission to make good cooperative sardines of its passengers, rather than to serve them as transport. There we link back to Philip’s original post.
There has been a lot of “investment” in the London Underground (taken over from its private owners back in 1933). But I suspect it has been mostly in new lines and fancy new stations rather than on keeping up the track.
Take Westminster underground railway station.
I can remember when this used to be an ordinary station – now it is vast complex of glass, steel and concrete.
Something to do with it being next door to Parliament? Or is that too cynical?
And then there are the widely expensive “work of art” stations on the extention to the Jubilee line.
Meanwhile the deep lines between stations (out of sight out of mind) continue to fall apart.
Every time I visit London a line is closed somewhere – because work only seems to be done when things are so far gone there is a safety risk.