Reportage: Once I was a commuting man

IT IS 5 PM and I am reading the number plates on the cars in front of me. It’s a little game I play: wondering is that person really from Cork or is the car second hand? It passes the time as I stop and start my way along Dame Street, heading for a quick run of the gauntlet through busses-only Fleet Street in the name of avoiding the deathtrap that is the junction of Westmoreland Street and D’olier Street – if you plan on heading south coming into D’olier Street requires a four lane drift that is surely worthy of a sequel to that awful Tokyo film.

Such are the measures that one must take to drive in Dublin. And yet I drive in and around the city almost every day. Environmentalists will at this point be purple-faced with rage about my carbon footprint. The truth is, though, I don’t care.

I catch a flash of yellow in my peripheral vision, like a hawk spotting its prey, this has my attention. I want to know if the car is Northern or British – there are an awful lot of British number plates in Dublin, too many given the amount of British tourists and business travellers. It has letters at the end – it’s British, not Northern. Another game: is this person a legitimate visitor over on business or holiday, or a Dubliner availing of cheaper insurance via access to a British address?

Dublin is not a city particularly well served by public transport. The Dart and Luas are fine, if overcrowded, and the busses are regular enough but uncomfortable and slow. Too many of us herded onto them by Dublin City Council’s insane traffic management schemes, designed specifically to slow private transport and irritate people out of their cars, and the city’s seeming inability to introduce traffic light phasing, Dublin Bus does the best it can. The drivers are usually polite – one gave me a free lift during a rainstorm when he saw my rain-sodden clothes and sad expression – and the recent cutting of routes is more the fault of the government than the bus company.

And yet, the experience is deeply unsatisfactory in a way that only busses ever can be. One day driving through Glencullen I notice a yellow shaft and a metre of pavement – it’s a bus stop. Dublin Bus serves Glencullen – how long does that journey take? And just how uncomfortable is it? Hopefully the route is served by a single deck coach – the prospect of being perched on a vertiginous double decker while whoosing around the Dublin mountains doesn’t bear thinking about.

On the N11 a bus whizzes past me, availing of its own special lane. Why do they operate all day? Why not just during the two daily rush hours? No matter. The radio is on and all is well. Soon, though, I shall not be in my happy bubble, I shall be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with my fellow man on that very bus.

***

I like to drive – there is immense satisfaction to be had in the roar of the engine, in subconsciously parsing the messages passed to the hands by the steering wheel. Anyone who sees a car as a mere mode of transport lacks the imagination required to be a driver. That glass in front of your eyes is not a windscreen, it is a cinema screen framing vistas that compare to the finest cinematography of Andrey Tarkovsky or perhaps one that delimits the camera’s boundaries in our own private Koyaanisqatsi, except without the moralising.

I am on a bus. It’s a Sunday and I am frozen stiff. The heating isn’t on but the real problem is that I have been waiting in the sleet for twenty minutes, stood against a wall staring up the road. This is not a pleasant experience.

On the seat beside me is a discarded newspaper, designed specifically for commuters, though more usually associated with trains. I don’t want to read it, a newspaper for people who don’t read newspapers. I prefer my newspapers to come without training stabilisers.

A day earlier I had read about how busses were a panacea for all of Dublin’s transit woes. Veteran journalist Vincent Browne had written, wordily, of his objections to the planned metro that will serve Dublin airport. According to Browne the underground is an expensive vanity project and we simply need more busses and bus lanes. It strikes me that he must be mad – the problem with the metro isn’t that it’s a grand project, it’s that it’s not grand enough. When the government and Rail Procurement Agency come out with plans for a metropolitan railway that serves Santry, Tallaght, Lucan, Mulhuddart and Blanchardstown with links into the city centre, northside and southside, as well as connecting with the Dart and Luas, then we can talk.

I am sat at the front of the top deck, enjoying the view out of the windscreen, though as a driver I find the absence of a steering wheel and pedals slightly disconcerting, especially when I hear the sudden thwack of tree branches on the upper level of the bus.

My co-passengers include a young, trendily dressed Chinese couple and a sad-looking Filipino woman. Otherwise the entire deck is empty. During rush-hour things would be different. The vehicle would be packed and would halt at every stop along the road.

There is an unspoken sociology, if not politics, of bus travel centred on the question of where to sit: the chatty elderly women with their trolleys, the ones with grey-white wheels that are so clearly superior to those tiny castors on modern suitcases, they sit as close to the front as possible. The regulars sit from the middle to the back of the lower deck. The upper deck, however, is where it all really happens: the natural habitat of roughs and teenage messers, invaded by young professionals coming and going from the city centre who don’t want the hassle or cost of driving and immigrants who haven’t the financial means to travel by any other method. If there is ever going to be trouble on a bus, it is on the upper deck that it will go down and despite this many of us find ourselves drawn to it with childlike wonderment

Woe betide any grown adult on the bus or train filled with schoolchildren: the noise levels are unbearable. Gaggles of youths jockeying for position, literally and metaphorically, the girls chirpily discussing the latest… whatever, their conversations punctuated with high-pitched squeals and the boys practising the disdainful irony and wry humour that will, in years to come, serve them well in their dealings with the opposite sex. For now, though, they haven’t mastered the amusing anecdote and the stories tend to just trail off into no man’s land. Their co-conspirators laugh uncertainly, knowing that amusing the fairer sex will take better stories.

 

***

It’s not people that are the problem. Having lived in west Belfast I have frequently used the taxi-busses, black Hackney cabs running on preordained routes as though on rails, sat thigh-to-thigh with people I had never met before, wondering every time the cornering forces them into me or me into them just what this intimacy between strangers meant.

Truth be told, most people on public transport are fine. Yes, there is the odd escaped mental patient, but on the whole it’s fine. The problem is freedom: commuting via public transport makes destiny, or perhaps predestination, a reality. Driving, I can do as I please. On the Falls Road in Belfast a taxi is rarely more than two minutes away. In Dublin? Fat chance.

It is 3 PM and I am on the Dart, due to get off two stations further down the line. It’s one of the old ones, manufactured in Japan, though it’s hard to imagine anyone in Japan accepting this particular piece of rolling stock as acceptable unless they’re some hick from Miyazaki Prefecture.

My phone rings. I answer it. It’s a colleague who wants to know how work is panning-out. He seems concerned so I try to reassure him that there is still plenty of work around. I thought I was being quiet, after all I don’t want to annoy any of the other passengers in the carriage – all three of them.

Too late. As the train brakes to screechy halt at my stop I get up only to find myself on the receiving end of a torrent of verbal abuse from an elderly man who refuses to explain exactly what the problem is.

He just keeps saying: “Think about it,” over and over again. All I can think about is Logan’s Run.

I feel my mood sink but gulp down the desire to either fly off the handle or collapse into misery.

It’s not always like this, though. Most journeys are entirely uneventful. In fact, events are exactly what you don’t want.

It is 2006 and I am returning home from a visit to a relative in a nursing home. Just out of Dalkey Dart station the train comes to an unceremonious halt. No announcements are made and the battery in my mobile phone is flat. Minutes pass. The lights go out. It is dark and I am alone in the carriage. I’m not scared but the total absence of any information – or the ability to get off the train – slightly worrying.

A few minutes later – perhaps ten, perhaps two – the train moves off again. I will arrive home tonight. I’ve heard of trains delayed because of fights breaking out and attempted suicides. Whatever the mysterious problem is with this particular train, it is obviously less serious.

 

***

I have served my time. I’ve bussed around Ireland, from Dublin to Belfast, from Belfast to Tipperary, from New Ross to Dublin (which required a change in Waterford). I’m used to it and while I have had several genuinely pleasant journeys, most are simply dull. I can sleep with my head against a vibrating pane of glass. In fact, in town or in country bus travel has an almost immediate soporific effect on me, the worrying part of which is fear of talking in my sleep or, worse still, the prospect of waking-up with an erection.

The former problem I deal with by licking my lips so that they glue shut. When I awake, if the seal is broken I need to worry. The latter problem is dealt with by placing a coat or bag on my lap.

I once worked as a kind of low-grade roving reporter so these problems were rather more frequent than would otherwise be expected and, as a result, weighed more heavily on my mind than they likely do for others.

It is possible to have an erotic experience on a bus, I suppose. It is 1994 and I am sixteen years old and headed for the city on a coach that left from the sprawling metropolis that is Gleann Cholm Cille, County Donegal.

Thump.

I look around but don’t see anything unusual.

Thump. Thump.

The girl in the seat behind me, attractive, at least two years older, has a pained look on her face.

Thump.

She frowns. She is sat one row ahead of the bus nutter, a elderly man who is, for some reason known, if at all, only to himself, hitting the back of her seat.

“Would you like to sit up here?”

“Actually, yes, that would be great, thanks.”

And so she does. We talk. She – her name now long forgotten – is travelling to go to college the next morning. I don’t quite admit that I’m still at school, after all, I have no problem getting served in pubs so I must be able to pass for a couple of years older at least. She laughs at my jokes, tells me about herself and we talk without diffidence or awkwardness.

Later she falls asleep – and onto my shoulder. I daren’t move. I don’t want to move. I don’t want to wake her. No. More accurately, I don’t want to move her.

Commuting is different, though. I know this, I was a commuter for a long time. There are regulars and we all have our individual spots on the platform or at the bus stop. We get to know one-another’s faces but we never speak. Diffidence. And sublimated frustration both at the mode of transport and our fellow passengers from whom we must silently absorb the most annoying of behavioural ticks. And, of course, the very fact of work.

 

***

The soon-to-be-late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher famously said that anyone over 30 riding the bus was one of life’s losers. Allegedly. Actually it’s not clear if she ever really uttered the words – they have also been attributed to a transit authority executive in New York. Either way, Thatcher presumably saw the bus as a form of communist taxi – the man on the Moscow omnibus probably didn’t vote Tory.

In reality, though, busses are more a utilitarian mode of transport than anything else. Unsurprisingly then, given we now live in an age where all worth is now judged by our ‘negative impact’, utilitarianism – and busses – are back in vogue. They serve all equally badly.

The Dublin Bus route 46A is known, to me at least, as the Magical Misery Tour. The nomenclature travels with me like excess baggage and I reserve it for particularly horrific journeys such as the old psychogeographic war tour that was a Belfast bus that ran the gauntlet between loyalist and republican areas just off the Falls Road. Exciting times indeed.

What the 46A lacks in excitement it more than makes up for in soul crushing tedium, taking an unbelievably long time to snake its way into the city from the suburbs.

As a child in Dublin the busses seemed breathtakingly exotic to me. Double-deckers in two-tone green, and some in cream if my memories are at all accurate. Later, living in Belfast, busses were burned-out in protests, their charred husks like rotted carcasses of whales seen on natural history television programmes would lie for a day or two before being hauled away leaving lumpy patches of melted asphalt. One bus I was on as child was hijacked and set alight. It was surprisingly uneventful. The passegers simply got off, as requested decidedly politely by the hijacker – this was politics, after all, not mere arson – and walked way. It seemed normal to all of us. Where busses are concerned, you can get used to anything – it’s simply a matter of conditioning.

Staring out the window I try to make sense of this memory but nothing comes. I do remember that the 46A was once known by the rather less prosaic, if inaccurate, name of ‘City Swift’.

Even in the leafy suburbs of south Dublin bus travel is a class issue. For a nation that likes to pride itself on class cohesion, public transport divides along class lines that would be familiar to Thatcher.  Both the busses and trains will take all comers and, true, late Darts often transport aggressive drinkers from one part of the city to the other, but it is on the busses that people of little means really travel.

Back in the 1980s I heard my elders discussing how the introduction of the Dart had increased property prices along its route. Thinking back, two things strike me: the obsession with property values isn’t nearly as recent a development as we like to imagine and that I doubt the introduction of a bus route ever did much for property prices.

 

***

It’s 6PM and I’m sat stationary in a queue of traffic on the N11 again. Another bus whizzes past. Good luck to it and all who ride in it, but I am staying in my car.