ANGRY YOU\ G MAN
Page 52
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WHAT is the most famous bus ride in fiction? My own candidate would be from the episode towards the end of" Lucky Jim," the novel in which Kingsley Amis portrayed in his hero perhaps the first of the angry young men. Anger is certainly the principal emotion generated on that celebrated journey. Jim Dixon persuades himself that his future happiness depends on getting to the local railway station in time to see his girl friend, who has gone to catch the London train. He chooses to go by bus, and it is at that point that the agony begins.
The distance travelled is given as eight "or so" miles; the fare paid is not recorded. We are merely told that "the conductor now appeared and negotiated with Dixon about his ticket." Whatever the duration of the journey, the circumstances would have made it seem an eternity. There is very little time to spare before the train leaves, but the bus driver is evidently determined not to hurry. As a result, the impatient passenger is driven to near lunacy. "Dixon found that his whole being had become centred in the matter of the bus' progress; he couldn't be bothered any longer to wonder what Christine would say to him if he got there in time, nor what he'd do if he didn't. He just sat there on the dusty cushions, stretching his face in a fresh direction at each overtaking car, each bend, each motiveless circumspection of the driver."
A lorry and trailer with an extra long load provide an obstacle to progress in the early stages. When at last they move into a lay-by, Dixon imagines the driver will start making up some of the lost time. "The driver was clearly unable to assent to this diagnosis." Further delays are caused by a succession of old and decrepit passengers, who appear to need any amount of time to satisfy themselves that what has drawn up alongside them is indeed a bus before they will consent to board it.
"As the traffic thickened slightly towards the town, the driver added to his hypertrophied caution a psychopathic devotion to the interests of other road users; the sight of anything between a removal van and a junior bicycle halved his speed to 4 m.p.h. _ and sent his hand flapping in a slow-motion St. Vitus' dance of beckonings and wavings-on."
AT this season of road transport conferences, there might be food in this incident for reflection and discussion. The pedestrian does not hesitate to inveigh against the motorist. who in his turn attacks the carrier of the outsize load. The railways make a habit of blaming most of their difficulties on the private car and on the C-licence vehicle. Perhaps because he has no organization to represent him, the passenger is usually inarticulate, although the immediate sympathy we feel for Lucky Jim in his predicament is an indication that his case is by no means rare.
Bus operators have a ready answer, and a complete one within the terms of their activities. Their services must run to time so far as possible. If a bus is unavoidably delayed, there is no help for it; but if it is ahead of time, it can and ought to slow down. Otherwise, gaps will be opened in the service, and passengers at bus stops will be kept waiting longer than is necessary. In genera!, the principle to be followed must be that of the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
From this point of view, each passenger is a statistic, e18 exactly the same as every other passenger. Surveys from time to time have marshalled the statistics into columns and plotted them on graphs. When appropriate, the investigation has become even more sophisticated. The travelling public are analysed according to their ages, their habits, their preferences in reading matter, their incomes, and so on. No serious attempt has ever been made to probe into their attitude towards the form of transport they are using.
It may well be that in the great majority of cases and for the great majority of journeys their attitude is neutral. They use a bus to get from one place to another and are not bothered too much about how long it takes. They may even spend the time reading. Prolonged delays, as in the centre of a large town, may irritate the passenger, but will not be blamed upon the bus company. He can see for himself that the trouble arises from too many vehicles trying to squeeze their way through too small a space. The fault may lie at the door of the Minister of Transport, or the local authority, or any one of half a dozen other scapegoats. So far from suggesting that the bus is in the wrong, the passenger virtually identifies himself with it and sympathizes with the driver and the conductor.
BY contrast, his fury is all the greater on those few occasions when it is a matter of some importance that he should travel with reasonable speed and when the bus driver is quite clearly dawdling. He feels very much the same as the motorist does about the outsize load. Although this particular obstacle to speed may rarely be met, it colours the attitude of the motorist far more than a thousand less memorable encounters with other vehicles. However perfect in principle the case for the outsize load and the crawling bus, the motorist and the passenger have difficulty in seeing how the principle applies in the examples that come their way.
The possibility of misunderstanding increases with the complexity of the service. Bus routes in a large town will often run side by side for a mile or more. The passenger who wishes to make a short journey quickly and finds a wide selection of buses arriving simultaneously at the stop where he is waiting, is annoyed, perhaps disproportionately, when he makes the wrong choice and sees disappearing into the distance other buses any one of which he could have boarded had he realized the situation.
Another familiar event is the arrival, possibly after a more prolonged wait than usual, of two buses bearing the same number. The waiting passengers fill the bus in front. Its empty companion thereupon swerves past, obviously in a considerable hurry. The driver of the laden bus is equally obviously not. Not until it is too late does' this vital fact become clear to the occupants, whose state of mind is not far removed from that of Lucky Jim's.
In each case a few words of information would have turned away wrath. In some ways, hesitantly and perhaps reluctantly, the lesson is beginning to sink home. London Transport are at last beginning to understand that the public will more easily tolerate a delay on the Underground if they hear an announcement giving the reasons, estimating the duration and offering alternative means of transport. The practice might well be extended to bus services. If the driver has time to lose, a notice to that effect would attract the passenger who felt similarly inclined and would warn the remainder.