Today I commuted on the VFR.
When I got to work I hopped off the bike and did a little dance and didn’t stop smiling for at least an hour (even though it was 6.45am when I arrived at work).
And on the homewards leg, when I arrived back at my house, I danced around the VFR singing loudly and smiling.
Even now my heart is full of such joy – this is what commuting on a motorbike can do for you.
Tomorrow I will catch a train to London, and then I shall ride on the Victoria line from Euston to Victoria.
Then I shall walk, about a mile, down to Westminster, dodging people as I go.
After a five-hour technical meeting, I shall walk the mile back from Westminster to Victoria, I shall submerge myself underground, and shall ride back to Euston.
Then I shall endure the homeward leg on The World’s Most Expensive Railway.
You want to reckon whether I’ll be singing and dancing and smiling when I get off the train in Rugby, at 7pm tomorrow evening?
Or when I get off the tube at Euston, before I get my train back home?
The inhumanity that we, in this country, seem to accept with no thought of rejection, that we inflict upon our commuting selves every day, is indescribable.
Since when did it become acceptable to shoe-horn people in to spaces so crammed with other humans that the threat of injury is very real?
Am I the only person who can remember that the Moorgate Tube Disaster produced rules (rules, not guidelines) on acceptable limits of square footage per passenger?
Am I the only person who can remember that the needlessly high death rate at Moorgate was because of overcrowding?
Does anyone – ever – get off the rush-hour underground, singing and dancing and happy and smiling (other than in satisfaction at having got out alive)?
The elephant in the room that is London’s transport calamity (because no matter how or where one looks, it is a terrible calamity), is that the entire transport network has reached capacity.
Where does London go from here?
Seriously.
Where does London’s rammed transport network go from here?
“Where does London’s rammed transport network go from here?”
I don’t know, but wherever it is, it’ll be going there very slowly and uncomfortably.